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Collective nouns for food | ||
Tags: Meaning of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4664 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes  Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 9 of 14 13 September 2013 at 4:01am | IP Logged | ||
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In Thai, you count bunches of bananas with the classifier 'wii' (rising tone). 'kluai wii neung, sorng wii, saam wii' etc = 1, 2, 3 bunches. The word 'wii' also means 'comb'. The idea is that bananas in a bunch look like the teeth of a comb, I suppose.
There's also a Taiwanese joke about a houseguest who doesn't bring a present to his hosts. They say 'he brought two bunches of bananas' - in other words, his empty hands. Edit: And according to the Longdo online dictionary, the French for 'bunch of bananas' is 'régime de bananes'! Edited by viedums on 13 September 2013 at 4:25am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 10 of 14 13 September 2013 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||
Oh, interesting! In German, a garlic clove is a "Knoblauchzehe" ("garlic toe"). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 11 of 14 13 September 2013 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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And it's just that last one that we also say.
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| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4557 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 12 of 14 13 September 2013 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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In Finnish it's valkosipulinkynsi, or "garlic nail" / "garlic claw". I'm surprised and delighted to see that so many languages seem to have related and yet different takes on this.
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| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4637 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 13 of 14 13 September 2013 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Continuing with the garlic, in Norwegian we say hvitløksbåt (garlic boat), obviously due to the form of a garlic clove. We also have the word "fedd" like in "ett fedd hvitløk" (one garlic clove). This is what you will normally see in recipes.
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| cacue23 Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4297 days ago 89 posts - 122 votes Speaks: Shanghainese, Mandarin*, English Studies: Cantonese | Message 14 of 14 13 September 2013 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I remember that one day when our teacher introduced us to the expression, and during the ensuing silence she promptly commented: "Well, you are not fish." That's... creepy... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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