ainurakne wrote:Linguaphile wrote:raudteerööbas railroad track
Isn't it more like
railroad rail?
Railroad track seems to be a lot more than that: rails + fasteners + railroad ties + ballast + underlying subgrade.
Ha, yeah, you are right. I was thinking as I wrote the translation that "railroad track" didn't seem right in the singular, but I couldn't figure out why. You got it: in the singular it's not a track but a rail, since the track is the whole thing. Your English seems better than mine here because I also wouldn't have known what to call "ballast and underlying subgrade" in English either and was thinking of "a track" as a single rail.
Anyway, thanks to all three of you for the information about
lumevaal. I had some difficulty figuring it out. The dictionaries gave the meanings I posted [
EKSS:
kokkuvajunud lumevall (maanteel);
ÕS:
kokkuvajunud lumeviirg maanteel] but searching for photos I got the impression that actual usage was a bit wider than that.
Lumevaal at the side of the road:
Lumevaal in the frozen sea:
Lumevaal under the eaves:
Plus several
lumevaalu like this, descriptions of which gave me the impression it also includes the snow pushed aside or crushed between the areas cleared by tire treads:
Also, I didn't list it, but another new word for me is
kokkuvajunud, which my Estonian-English dictionaries list as deflated, collapsed, broken down. That re-enforced my impression that the lumevaal included the snow that had been pushed together by the tires.
From various dictionaries:
kokku vajuma to crash out, to sag, to collapse, to break down, to subside (together), to fall or collapse slowly, to sink down, to break down
(By the way, does anyone know how to adjust the size of images so that they are smaller when I post them? I think I used to know how to do that, but apparently I've forgotten. I would have liked to do that above so that this post didn't take up so much space on the page/screen, but I don't know how.)