Isn’t it strange how languages have tons of homonyms we hardly notice while having synonyms for almost anything else? Thanks for sharing I’ll check that out.

[–] flicker@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"Shifty stack of maple drawers" is this best thing I've read all week. Thank you for that.

[–] jopepa@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

You’re welcome thanks yourself

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Prepositions are probably one of the parts of speech that is the hardest to translate in any language.

I learned Swedish as a second language, and it feels like "at", "for", and "on" are completely randomly interchanged, even though each word has a direct translation and both Swedish and English are Germanic languages at their core. There are multiple forms of "to" in Swedish too.

The "usage notes" section for the Swedish word for "On" is an experience lol
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%A5#Usage_notes

Luckily, they're also the most forgiving part at any speech of mistranslate.

[–] jopepa@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

It’s no wonder doctors in linguistics dip into philosophy as often as they do, incredible minds to know enough languages to study them. Polyglots are cool