(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by clawgrip »

Vlürch wrote: 23 Jan 2021 20:19 I figured I'd post to say that on Reddit, I was told it really is just "[number]番のロッカー" but the user also explained that there's a nuance difference from "[number]番目のロッカー", that the the former may be more likely to actually have a number on it while the latter may be more likely to refer to a locker you'd have to count is the [number]th... which does make sense, like the English difference between "locker number [number]" and "[number]th locker", but I'd have never figured out that there's such a nuance difference between and 番目 on my own. [O.O]

Well, I'd never figure anything out on my own, but that even less than anything else.
I realize I'm late here, but:
[number]番のロッカー indicates the locker that has been assigned this number, e.g. locker number 3;
[number]番目のロッカー indicates the nth locker in an identifiable series, e.g. 3rd locker from the left, 3rd locker I opened, etc.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Not sure if this is the correct place to ask this, but I struck upon an idea for a mythical beast that feeds on people's shame, and for whatever reason, wanted to coin a name for it in Spanish (maybe due to the strong undercurrent of shame present in Roman Catholicism... a religion prominent in Spanish-speaking countries?). However, "comedor de vergüenza" doesn't exactly have a nice ring. So I began to look into shortenings, and compound words in Spanish and didn't really hit on anything that I liked. The best I could get was something like "comevergüenzas." However, something more along the lines of a "vergüencero" sounds better, but I was unsure if that would carry any useful meaning in Spanish.

Anyone have any input (or suggest a better place to ask)?
Xonen wrote: 28 Dec 2019 16:50 Irregardless, a quick Google search suggests that "deceptively simple" may, for all intensive purposes, be becoming the new way of saying "surprisingly simple". [¬.¬]
I see what you did there, and I hate it.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Pabappa »

pluralizing an emotion seems a bit odd to me, even if it's meant to signify multiple people as the object. i'm not a native speaker, but Im saying this from a metalinguistic viewpoint, not a Spanish speakers' viewpoint ... I cant really offer a better word but comevergüenzas just doesnt feel right to me. maybe if the word for shame were replaced by some tangible object that could be associated with shame it would work better.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Pabappa wrote: 19 Feb 2021 11:50 pluralizing an emotion seems a bit odd to me, even if it's meant to signify multiple people as the object. i'm not a native speaker, but Im saying this from a metalinguistic viewpoint, not a Spanish speakers' viewpoint ... I cant really offer a better word but comevergüenzas just doesnt feel right to me. maybe if the word for shame were replaced by some tangible object that could be associated with shame it would work better.
I see your point, and thought similar. However, the word came from the pattern of combining words in Spanish and many of them end in "s" despite not acting plural. For instance, the word for umbrella is made from <para> and <agua-s>, the second of which is a word that isn't really typically plural but has an 's' regardless.

But, it is exactly the kinda less than perfect fit that prompted me to ask the question here.
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Post by Salmoneus »

Pabappa wrote: 19 Feb 2021 11:50 pluralizing an emotion seems a bit odd to me, even if it's meant to signify multiple people as the object. i'm not a native speaker, but Im saying this from a metalinguistic viewpoint, not a Spanish speakers' viewpoint ... I cant really offer a better word but comevergüenzas just doesnt feel right to me. maybe if the word for shame were replaced by some tangible object that could be associated with shame it would work better.
From a metalinguistic viewpoint, if emotion is a noun, then it's likely to be a mass noun. However, optional pluralisation of mass nouns is a feature of many languages - including of course English, including with emotions. Indeed, talk of "shames" isn't uncommon - more so than most emotions. This may be because shame isn't really an emotion, it's a relationship - and similarly, other relationships pluralise more easily ("loves", "trusts", "faiths", "alienations", etc), whereas true emotions (?angers) seem to pluralise with more difficulty. That said, "joy" is a paradigmatic emotion, and pluralises extremely easily, whereas something like "pride" is mostly a relationship, yet doesn't easily pluralise. So maybe my initial intuition was just a coincidence...

[some people call these relationships "external emotions" or the like. Apparently cultures differ in how many external vs internal emotions there are - some peoples may have no genuine internal emotions at all]

[while we're on the pedantic point: traditionally Catholic culture is more associated with guilt than with shame. The shame-culture (machismo, etc) associated with spanish speakers seems to be stronger in the new world, particularly mexico and central america? Or, if it is ancestral, perhaps it's Arabic influence? I don't know.]
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sequor »

Salmoneus wrote: 19 Feb 2021 13:55[while we're on the pedantic point: traditionally Catholic culture is more associated with guilt than with shame.
That's an association that's peculiar to English-speaking Catholics, as far as I know. I remember being quite shocked the first time I heard about it, circa 2011, and was pretty damn amused to find, that day, that "Catholic guilt" (in English) gave tons of results on Google, including newspaper articles and blog articles, while "culpa católica" only gave two results: one was a Spanish speaker asking what "Catholic guilt" meant in English in the comments of a Spanish website, and the other was a Portuguese speaker asking what "Catholic guilt" meant in English in a Portuguese-speaking forum... (pthag had quite a chuckle when I told him about it that day too...)

It appears there's more relevant results now though, including a blog in Spanish, and someone on a site asking what the difference between Jewish and Catholic guilt is. The idea is perhaps spreading.
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Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

Thrice Xandvii wrote: 19 Feb 2021 11:20 Not sure if this is the correct place to ask this, but I struck upon an idea for a mythical beast that feeds on people's shame, and for whatever reason, wanted to coin a name for it in Spanish (maybe due to the strong undercurrent of shame present in Roman Catholicism... a religion prominent in Spanish-speaking countries?). However, "comedor de vergüenza" doesn't exactly have a nice ring. So I began to look into shortenings, and compound words in Spanish and didn't really hit on anything that I liked. The best I could get was something like "comevergüenzas." However, something more along the lines of a "vergüencero" sounds better, but I was unsure if that would carry any useful meaning in Spanish.
If you change it to "guilt", which Sequor's last post showed me is culpa in Spanish, and are fine with more vampiric associations, how about chupaculpas "guilt sucker"? It works as a pun on the chupacabras.
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Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Maybe a middle ground of comeculpas? It distances itself from the goat sucker (which I like), and also makes it a bit less sing-songy.
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Post by Salmoneus »

Sequor wrote: 19 Feb 2021 17:02
Salmoneus wrote: 19 Feb 2021 13:55[while we're on the pedantic point: traditionally Catholic culture is more associated with guilt than with shame.
That's an association that's peculiar to English-speaking Catholics, as far as I know. I remember being quite shocked the first time I heard about it, circa 2011, and was pretty damn amused to find, that day, that "Catholic guilt" (in English) gave tons of results on Google, including newspaper articles and blog articles, while "culpa católica" only gave two results: one was a Spanish speaker asking what "Catholic guilt" meant in English in the comments of a Spanish website, and the other was a Portuguese speaker asking what "Catholic guilt" meant in English in a Portuguese-speaking forum... (pthag had quite a chuckle when I told him about it that day too...)

It appears there's more relevant results now though, including a blog in Spanish, and someone on a site asking what the difference between Jewish and Catholic guilt is. The idea is perhaps spreading.
Yeah, and fish have no word for water!

But seriously, the phrase "Catholic guilt" only makes sense in a non-Catholic (or at least mixed) culture - there's no need to point to features of Catholic culture when everyone around you shares those features because they're all Catholic. I suspect that if it's true that 'the idea is spreading' in Spanish-language media, it's perhaps a reaction to increasing secularisation.

I don't understand how anyone could go through catechesis and not recognise the centrality of guilt - the recognition of sin in oneself and the desire to atone for or expurgate that sin - in Catholic teaching. I mean, this is a religion in which it is quite literally a fundamental moral requirement to regularly tell someone all the things that you feel guilty about. And to demonstrate to the authorities that you feel appropriately guilty about them. To the extent that people who don't feel that guilty can feel pressured to invent bad things that they didn't actually do, just so they can display appropriate guilt over something that week!
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I would consider Germany a mixed culture, but I have not heard the German equivalent of the phrase. I know some of the situations Sal described (making up sins) from stand-up comedians, but on the other hand I was weirded out by the catholic character in Board Walk Empire on his guilt trip. In Germany, AFAIK, Catholics are known for being fun, happy and very keen on amusement.
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Creyeditor wrote: 20 Feb 2021 11:36 In Germany, AFAIK, Catholics are known for being fun, happy and very keen on amusement.
Yes, I think that's probably the stereotype everywhere. Catholicism is traditionally associated with - by puritan standards - 'hot-blooded', 'passionate' lifestyles with lots of music and dancing and fighting; that stereotype may be less explicit in English culture - there's no easy term for it - but it's part of how we see catholic cultures in general (Irish, Spanish, Italian, etc). This is probably less due to any feature of Catholic dogma per se, and more due to the contrast with Protestant dourness (that is, I suspect it's less that Catholics are unusually fun, and more that Protestant culture is by historical standards unusually un-fun).

The two things are probably on some level flip sides of the same coin. Catholicism tends to emphasise the scrutability of the moral universe - you know what you did wrong! - but also the possibility of, and need for, atonement, both through interior repentance (guilt) and exterior good works. In vernacular catholicism, this has often even taken on a rather transactional dimension - it's bad that you got drunk and sang a bawdy song, but if you say six hail marys and help out at the fete, God will be fine with it. Protestantism, on the other hand, tends to emphasise the helplessness of the individual in the face of god's inscrutable wrath. You can't necessarily know whether you've done wrong (though of course obeying the commandments is a good start), and if you have then there's certainly nothing you could do or say or feel that would merit forgiveness. Instead, you need to have and demonstrate your single-minded faith in God - have faith that he'll keep you from doing evil, and have faith that he'll forgive you if you do do evil. In vernacular protestantis, this has often even taken on a rather 'see no evil' dimension: as what matters is being truly faithful, and the truly faithful don't sin much to begin with because it's faith that keeps you free from sin, feeling guilty about something is effectively proof that you don't have enough faith and are going to hell. This takes on its most extreme form in some versions of calvinism, in which confessing to even a single sin can mark you out as condemned to hell (as the truly Elect don't sin - at least, not once they've been Saved).

This tends to encourage a lot of worrying about what you're going to do, but discourages too much worrying about what you've already done, since there's nothing you can do about it now anyway. Whereas Catholicism tends to encourage worrying about what you've done (because otherwise you can't be forgiven), but de-emphasises worrying about what you're going to do (because hey, don't worry, you can be forgiven for it). [In crude, modern terms: Catholicism traditionally takes more of a 'better to ask forgiveness than permission' approach, whereas Protestants were very keen on making sure you have permission, because who knows if you'll be forgiven or not]

So the emphasis on confession and forgiveness - not in a single, life-cleansing, new-slate, "born again" sense, but in a detailed, weekly, sin-by-sin sense, encourages both a more libertine approach to minor sins, and also the guilt that catalogues them.

[perhaps it would be more accurate to say: 'Catholic guilt' wasn't really meant to describe an excess of guilt, but a different kind of guilt. There's more emphasis on sin-by-sin guilt and the need for contrition and good works to atone, and less emphasis on the sort of global, existential guilt (the inherent iniquity of mankind) that many Protestant groups stress.]


Of course, the underlying theology of both faiths is more similar than its general interpretation even by priests - it's more a difference of emphasis than of fundamental belief.

And that all said, I doubt there's much difference today, with the de-emphasis of the confessional in modern Catholicism, and the decline of the power of the Church in general.
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Post by Dormouse559 »

To keep the conversation on track, the original point was to help Thrice find a suitable Spanish name for a mythical creature that feeds on guilt and/or shame. Thoughts on his most recent proposal, comeculpas?
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I think it sounds great.
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Post by elemtilas »

Dormouse559 wrote: 20 Feb 2021 20:53 To keep the conversation on track, the original point was to help Thrice find a suitable Spanish name for a mythical creature that feeds on guilt and/or shame. Thoughts on his most recent proposal, comeculpas?
Fits in with other Spanish compounds, tocadiscos, lavaropas.
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Post by Khemehekis »

Rompecabezas!
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Post by Raginaharjaz »

Do Romanian cases come directly from Vulgar Latin or are adaptations from Slavic?
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Post by All4Ɇn »

Raginaharjaz wrote: 23 Feb 2021 13:26Do Romanian cases come directly from Vulgar Latin or are adaptations from Slavic?
The nominative/accusative and genitive/dative cases come directly from Vulgar Latin but their survival in modern Romanian is likely because of Slavic. The vocative case was partially inherited from Vulgar Latin in the form of the ending -e but its other forms were borrowed from Slavic such as the feminine vocative ending -o.
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Post by eldin raigmore »

Is this translation good, bad, so-so, great, or terrible?
Pożegnanie i adieu, ty miły hiszpański panie;
pożegnanie i adieu, panie Hiszpanii.
Albo w każdym razie, że już was zobaczymy.
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Post by Shemtov »

Could a house be considered an inalienable possession, if in traditional society, people didn't change houses?
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Post by Vlürch »

Shemtov wrote: 25 Mar 2021 17:32Could a house be considered an inalienable possession, if in traditional society, people didn't change houses?
Probably? I don't know anything about natlangs with alienable and inalienable possession, but it'd make sense that it can be very language-dependent. If the culture has strong family structures and children are raised with a sense of obligation to continue the lineage at their family's house and the houses themselves are held in great value, then at least logically it'd make sense for houses to be inalienable... but on the other hand, what if, say, parents disown the child who would've inherited their house? I imagine in a society with strong enough family structures and valuing of houses for houses to be considered inalienable possessions, there'd also be quite a lot of parents not wanting their kids to inherit their house if the kids turned out to disappoint them or whatever...?🤔

So yeah, sorry for the pointless reply. It's an interesting question and I hope someone who knows about such languages knows.
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