the sorts of old books that things like that seem to pop up in are the victorian era things, that google seems to have scanned from obscure books gathering dust in libraries like Harvard etc, the ones that are often looking to find linkages to the lost tribes of israel and weird etymologies for place names or claiming the caucasus were once part of a Welsh speaking empire etc, so no authoratative or trusted sources by any means, but I have come across that idea at least a couple of times and its stuck in the subconscious and because it seems plausible Iâve wondered about the possibility?
Donât forget that in your English example âonesâ is superfluous. For instance, âWhat about these?â is far neater than âWhat about these ones?â.
I used to get fed up with pointing out to my kids to no avail that âmy oneâ and âmy onesâ should be replaced by âmineâ. Dads,eh?
Yes. If you read some of the rather fanciful ideas in the book, it seems that the author was on the search for the Language of Heaven, or at least the language of the Garden of Eden, and he concludes after a whole bunch of Biblical literalism and wishful thinking that it was probably Celtic.
Itâs nothing to do with policing the language but about understanding that colloquialisms, commonplace or otherwise, rarely translate word for word. Translation, however formal or informal, is about moving ideas and concepts accurately from one language to another and not about substituting words on a one-by-one basis. The better we understand the source language the more chance we will have of being able to render the meaning faithfully in the target language.
Couldnât agree more. Possession in Welsh is thought of differently: the entire concept is approached from another direction. Ownership is more specific if we start involving words like âperthynâ, but the use of have in English is rarely understood to be ambiguous (but context brings specificity). For most people, itâs use is subconscious and natural, because the speaker understands instinctively what they are trying to say (and they always hope the listener uses/understands the words used in the same way the speaker does).
The SSiW way of learning is to absorb in a natural, almost childlike way, words and phrases that are used âin the wildâ. Thatâs why the forum is such a good backup/research tool!
The langpol referrals are always tongue-in-cheek, because we prefer to keep things lightâŚ
Translating the Cockney expression âhad it away on his toesâ would be quite difficult I think.
(and if we leave out the âon his toesâ then it has quite another meaning, but we wonât go there).
A certain Gareth Watkins recommended a book to me:- Geiriadur Idiomau and I find it very useful for finding idiomatic equivalents. Aran persuaded me a while ago that translating was difficult and that finding equivalents was more like it!
I also use Geiriadur.net to find very interesting phrases based on a wordâŚ
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