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So many different words

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14 messages over 2 pages: 1 2 
Josquin
Heptaglot
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Germany
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Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
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 Message 9 of 14
19 July 2014 at 5:32pm | IP Logged 
I beg your pardon, the dictionary clearly says "Anziehen der Preise". This is a genitive plural and translates as "hardening of prices". You need to be aware of the endings used, as a little -e or -n can make a huge difference in German. "Anziehen der Preis" wouldn't make any sense at all.

You can say: "Die Preise ziehen an" or "Der Händler hat den Preis angezogen". Using the noun phrase you cited, we could say: "Das Anziehen der Preise an den Märkten ist besorgniserregend."
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Arnaud25
Diglot
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France
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Studies: Russian

 
 Message 10 of 14
19 July 2014 at 6:15pm | IP Logged 
shk00design wrote:
Every language has its own set of rules that are not the same. Like in English we would say: "it's a nice
day", "it's far from here", "it's a good restaurant". In all 3 cases we say "It is" in English. In French you'd
say something like "il fait beau" / "il fait du soleil", "c'est loin d'ici", "il est un bon restaurant".
It's a good restaurant = C'est un bon restaurant. ("il est un bon restaurant" is not incorrect but you'll use it only to give an archaïc or super-pedandic flavor to your sentence. It's not natural in everyday speech.)
"It's far from here" can be translate either by "c'est loin d'ici" or "il est loin d'ici" depending what's the exact meaning of "it" and the context.
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soclydeza85
Senior Member
United States
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Speaks: English*
Studies: German, French

 
 Message 11 of 14
19 July 2014 at 9:40pm | IP Logged 
Josquin wrote:
I beg your pardon, the dictionary clearly says "Anziehen der Preise". This is a genitive plural and translates as "hardening of prices". You need to be aware of the endings used, as a little -e or -n can make a huge difference in German. "Anziehen der Preis" wouldn't make any sense at all.


Oops, my mistake. I don't know how I overlooked that. I know all the rules for the endings and such, my brain didn't think about looking at article declension since I was focused on "anziehen" and its meaning (or rather, multiple meanings to a word in general).
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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 Message 12 of 14
21 July 2014 at 10:26am | IP Logged 
A good bilingual dictionary will often come up with several translations of a given word (a very good one will even explain the difference between them). When you see those alternative translations it may seem that the headword has a very diffuse and heterogenous meaning, where the truth is that the two languages in question just divide the semantic spectrum in different ways. In that case you have to look through the bewilering multitude of translations to see whether there is one common semantic core in the target language which just has to be rendered in diffferent ways in your base language.

Of course there are cases where sound changes and other processes lead the accidental formation of true homonyms, i.e. words where one spelling and pronunciation covers two totally disjunct sets of meanings (and consequently two sets of translations), but in most cases there is something that ties the different uses of this word together in the target language. It may be difficult to define exactly what it is, but those different usages wouldn't have evolved if the native speakers didn't see a connection.

And the meaning of the foreign word is that eerie 'something', whether you can render it in a simple way in your own language or not.

Edited by Iversen on 21 July 2014 at 10:30am
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Doitsujin
Diglot
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Germany
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Speaks: German*, English

 
 Message 13 of 14
21 July 2014 at 12:28pm | IP Logged 
Josquin wrote:
You can say: [...] "Der Händler hat den Preis angezogen".

IMHO, "Preise anziehen" is mainly used intransitively.
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soclydeza85
Senior Member
United States
Joined 3898 days ago
357 posts - 502 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, French

 
 Message 14 of 14
21 July 2014 at 2:29pm | IP Logged 
@Iversen - Yeah, when I look up the meaning of a word now I make sure to look at all of the variations it has and pay attention to the core meaning between all of them. Some of them can be pretty obvious, while it's tough to see "it" with others.


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