Mot du jour, etc.

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Katya
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

Giovanni Schwartz wrote:Nope!

It's actually a hearse.
Ohhhh! Mico was kind of close.
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mic0
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by mic0 »

I didn't guess, but I can take the credit! ^_- Dead Cat was pretty close. :)
Katya
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

mic0 wrote:I didn't guess, but I can take the credit! ^_- Dead Cat was pretty close. :)
Oops. Sorry, Dead Cat! :oops:
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Dead Cat
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Dead Cat »

Katya wrote:
mic0 wrote:I didn't guess, but I can take the credit! ^_- Dead Cat was pretty close. :)
Oops. Sorry, Dead Cat! :oops:
If I'm going to get confused with someone, I'm flattered that it was Mico :).
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Katya
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

Dead Cat wrote:
Katya wrote:
mic0 wrote:I didn't guess, but I can take the credit! ^_- Dead Cat was pretty close. :)
Oops. Sorry, Dead Cat! :oops:
If I'm going to get confused with someone, I'm flattered that it was Mico :).
That's a very gracious response.
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

rongeur (nm) - rodent
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

envergure (nf) - wingspan; stature, calibre; scope, scale, range
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Yarjka »

тля - aphid

I was playing a ladybug board game with my daughter and decided to use Russian. I knew all the bugs except for this one.

Apparently, if you want to call someone "a nobody" in Russian, you can call them an aphid. I'll have to try it out sometime and see how it goes.
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Giovanni Schwartz
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Giovanni Schwartz »

Random statement of fact: I started a choir with some friends, and for a warm-up piece yesterday, we all sang a Russian (actually, Ukrainian) song. Except since none of us speak Ukrainian, we're doing it on la for now.
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Tally M.
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Tally M. »

One of my favorite Finnish words is "yksikertainen" which translates literally to "one time" and means "simple". The opposite, "difficult" is "monimutkainen" which literally means "many turns/twists".
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Portia »

abricotier - p. 271, Notre-Dame de Paris - apricot tree

I was excited that this was likely to appear in the French Children's Songbook, but find no evidence that this is so.

Alors, my submission:
Par la fenêtre qu'est-ce que vous voyez?
Pop-corn éclatant sur l'abricotier.
Printemps m'a apporté une bonne surprise!
Toutes les fleurs fleurissent sous la brise.

Je prendrais une brassée, une gâterie,
Flocon de pop-corn qui sent si gentil.
Ce n'était pas le cas, mais il me semblait
Pop-corn éclatant sur l'abricotier!
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Giovanni Schwartz
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Giovanni Schwartz »

I love exploding rice flower! #Chinese #爆米花
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Portia
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Portia »

Katya wrote:
Portia wrote:molles collines
mailles redoublées
la roideur

Oh, Hugo, the back page of your book makes me question my major.
Are you going to deign to define any of those? ;)
There he stood, grave, motionless, absorbed in one look and one thought. All Paris lay at his feet, with the thousand spires of its edifices and its circular horizon of gentle hills—with its river winding under its bridges, and its people moving to and fro through its streets,—with the clouds of its smoke,—with the mountainous chain of its roofs which presses Notre-Dame in its doubled folds; but out of all the city, the archdeacon gazed at one corner only of the pavement, the Place du Parvis; in all that throng at but one figure,—the gypsy.

It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this look, and whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face,—one would have said that nothing living was left about Claude Frollo except his eyes.
Finally got to the section of the book from which this was extracted. Translations are in bold, from Project Gutenberg.
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

souche (nf) - stump

source: Wikipedia article on vultures. (They like to lay their eggs on flat surfaces, such as on a souche.)
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

chevalier (nm) - The word usually means "knight" but it can also mean "sandpiper."
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Whistler »

手ぶら
(てぶら, tebura)
bra-less. Literally "hand bra" (like, you have no bra so you have to use your hands to cover them). I'm not sure if it means naked as well.
I found it while I was trying to look up "tebukuro" which means mitten or gauntlet (same hand kanji for "te").
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

côtoyer - to rub shoulders with, to mix with; to stand alongside

This word comes from the French word côté, meaning "side," so the verb's meanings are related to that.

As an aside, I'm wondering if all verbs ending "-oyer" are derived from other words in the same way. The one that comes first to mind is nettoyer, meaning "to clean," which probably comes from net, meaning "clean" (among other things). Also plaidoyer, "to plead or defend," apparently from plaid, meaning "court." I'm also wondering what the closest English equivalent would be. Maybe "-ify"? ("Cleanify"? Sure. :D)
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Marduk »

That's similar to Spanish, Katya, but I think far more widespread. Tons of verbs' infinitive forms you can truncate to get a noun. The difference in English is that the infinitive forms aren't single words, they require the addition of a preposition, so it loses that ability.
Deus ab veritas
Katya
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Katya »

Marduk wrote:That's similar to Spanish, Katya, but I think far more widespread. Tons of verbs' infinitive forms you can truncate to get a noun.
Yeah, I suppose it's also pretty widespread in French (danser/la danse), it's just that something feels a bit different about the "-oyer" ending that I can't quite put my finger on. (It's like when I learned that the "-ir" verb ending generally indicates a change of state, so "blanchir" is "to whiten" and "rougir" is "to redden," etc.) I'll have to think more about it.
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Re: Mot du jour, etc.

Post by Portia »

Katya wrote:côtoyer - to rub shoulders with, to mix with; to stand alongside

This word comes from the French word côté, meaning "side," so the verb's meanings are related to that.
Hugo uses a synonym for this. I'll edit when I find it.
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