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35 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Lugubert
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Sweden
Joined 6869 days ago
186 posts - 235 votes

Speaks: Swedish*, Danish, Norwegian, English^C2, German, Dutch, French
Studies: Mandarin, Hindi

Message 33 of 35

11 July 2014 at 2:20pm | IP Logged

Stolan wrote:

I am not a fan of these "untranslatable" word lists, vocabulary is potentially limitless in any language.
Nevertheless, I love unique words from most languages.

Here's a lovely example for you: Chinese 眠 mián. It occurs in compounds like 睡眠 shuìmián 'sleep', but free standing and with silkworms in the near context, it means 'stop feeding for a while after feeding for a few days'. Source: Yuen Ren Chao, in his formidable A Grammar of Spoken Chinese.
1 person has voted this message useful

Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
Joined 4670 days ago
1199 posts - 2192 votes

Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali

Message 34 of 35

14 July 2014 at 3:38pm | IP Logged

vonPeterhof wrote:

pesahson wrote:

05/enhanced/webdr05/8/8/enhanced-3133-1399553182-
4.jpg">

I'm a native speaker of Russian
who has done this on occasion (and have had
acquaintances who had the annoying habit of doing
this literally every time they needed to call
someone), and I had no idea we had a word for this.
I mean, I know the word прозвонить in its literal,
bell-related senses of "to ring once" or "to ring
continuously for a certain period of time", so I
can see how one could derive that idiomatic meaning
for this word from the first definition, but I
probably wouldn't have guessed it without having
read the explanation. If I saw the sentence "Я
прозвонил ей" without any further context I would
just assume that it meant "I made a single attempt
at calling her on the phone". A brief Google search
didn't turn up anything with this meaning, but
apparently this word also has a different meaning
in the jargon of various technological professions,
something like "to run a current through an
electrical network (a cable, a device, etc.) in
order to test its integrity and isolation"

"Prozvonit" is said CIMATI in Croatian.
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Enrico
Diglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
Joined 3747 days ago
162 posts - 207 votes

Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: Italian, Spanish, French

Message 35 of 35

31 August 2014 at 3:48am | IP Logged

Cualacino

1 person has voted this message useful

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