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Indo-European Hygiene | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4949 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 17 23 January 2012 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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The title may or not have elicited a chuckle or even a guffaw, but I talked to this guy last weekend and he was talking about how to explain to a person whose language only has one word for "cleaning" the difference between Spanish "lavar" and "limpiar".
That got me thinking: SP: lavar/limpiar EN: to wash/to clean DE: waschen/reinigen FR: laver/nettoyer It seems many european languages have a distinction for this activity. You don't really clean your hands, but wash them. You can clean your car and wash it though. For this person (whose first language is a small native blood language from western Argentina), you just "clean" everything, from yourself to a pot. Is there any general guidelines to why in many European languages one verb is used instead of the other? In general, the usage of "to wash" and "to clean" correlates to the corresponding verb in the other language (at least the ones I know). So some historical usage must be at play. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5693 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 2 of 17 23 January 2012 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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In German, there's also "sauber machen" and "putzen" as well as the two you named! And your post made me realize I don't really know the difference between them all. I get the impression that "waschen" definitely involves water (like washing the dishes – "Abwasch" – or clothes in a washing machine). If I'm just organizing/straightening up/maybe sweeping my room, I think that's "saubermachen", and "putzen" makes me think of scrubbing things, for some reason... no idea about "reinigen", though (although it doesn't really make me think of water).
Is the basic difference between the verbs you listed that one involves more water than the other? Or am I just making this up? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4949 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 17 23 January 2012 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well yes, I know about putzen. Sauber machen seems more of a specific form of expressing "reinigen", in the sense that you make something free of impurities or disorder, stressing the end condition. Reinigen is just a general cleaning of things emphasizing the action instead of the result like "sauber machen".
Spanish also has other verbs such as "asear". But the pairs I chose recurred in my four languages and Portuguese too (which I'm learning but right now focusing on French): PT: lavar/limpar Edited by outcast on 23 January 2012 at 11:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5599 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 17 23 January 2012 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think in Russian you use стирать for your clothes, but мыть for everything else. For "to clean" you may also say чистить and if you make something free of disorder, you may say убирать.
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| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 5 of 17 24 January 2012 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Swedish do not have the strong wash/clean thingy, we have no good verb that has the same meaning as ‹clean› but
rather two: städa (tidy up) and rengöra (clean-make). Everything can be ‹rengöra› but, it sounds awkward if there’s other verbs to use for the particular situation. tvätta, to wash, always involved water; one can do it to clothes and fabrics, cars, oneself städa, to clean, to tidy, when you trow away trash, sweet the floors and vacuum, put things where they belong, it can be done to rooms, drawers, cabins, the inside of a car, the desktop, etc. etc. rengöra, to clean, most often targeted towards dirt, you cannot rengöra something that is not dirty. Most often used on small objects or things that are not usually washed, jewellery, old paintings and their frames, stuff diska, to wash dishes, only applies to plates, cutlery, pots, etc. kitchen stuff… spola, to flush, done to floors, cars, humans, and it basically means to spray water on something and letting it run off torka, lit «to dry» , done with a rag on tabletops, walls, anything flat svabba, to mop, floors, the deck on a boat, etc. etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 17 24 January 2012 at 8:23am | IP Logged | ||
BTW in English and German it's even more obvious: wash/waschen/water/Wasser :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlephBey Tetraglot Groupie India Joined 4788 days ago 41 posts - 137 votes Speaks: English, Hindi*, Urdu, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 7 of 17 24 January 2012 at 8:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Many languages have the same word for ideas that are considered essentially different
by speakers of other languages. In Bengali, for example, 'to eat' and 'to drink' are both the same- 'khete', a cognate of the Hindi 'khana'- 'to eat'. We have a certain stereotype of Bengalis that speak Hindi, always using the wrong grammatical gender and occasionally uttering such oddities as 'Aapne pani khaya?' (Did you eat water?). How different are 'eating' and 'drinking' anyway? Both refer to the same activity- ingestion. In one case of liquid, and in the other of solid. Indonesian uses the same word for 'ice' and 'water'; and come to think of it, they are the same thing differing only in temperature. Japanese uses the same expression for 'I do' and 'I will do', in that there's no separate future tense. Hindi uses the same word for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'. You have to depend on tense and context to surmise which is being referred to. There's actually a Wikipedia article on languages that consider 'blue' and 'green' different colors as opposed to the same. There are also several examples of languages that differentiate between concepts that'd strike us as the same. Japanese uses different words for 'cold/lukewarm water' (mizu) and 'hot water' (yu), it's downright awkward to say that 'yu' collected on your roof after rain, or that you need to add 'mizu' to your tea. Anyone who has studied a Romance language would be aware of the many tenses and moods that the English language doesn't explicitly distinguish. I believe the terms and expressions in our native language often impact the way we 'compartmentalize' the various parts of the universe. It affects what we consider the 'same thing' as opposed to 'different things'. Takao Suzuki explained this very well in his book 'Words in Context'. As for the case with 'washing' as opposed to 'cleaning', this is probably just another example of a semantic distinction acknowledged by some languages while ignored by others. As for why it's so prevalent among Indo-European languages in particular, I think it might just be a vestige of our shared past. Like the fact that all our languages seem to distinguish between past, present and future in verb conjugation paradigms; or seem to have at least an insignificant, inconspicuous relic of a grammatical gender system even when the language has lost gender. Edit: More points added Edited by AlephBey on 24 January 2012 at 9:28am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 8 of 17 24 January 2012 at 10:33am | IP Logged | ||
Not surprisingly, Dutch has pretty much the exact same words; wassen, schoonmaken, reinigen and poetsen. I wouldn't really count poetsen though, since it feels more like a subcategory of schoonmaken, like vegen and stoffen. Then again, it is often used as a colloquial synonym for schoonmaken so maybe it should count. I agree that wassen involves water while schoonmaken kind of covers all kinds of cleaning. The main difference between reinigen and schoonmaken is the register, since reinigen is quite formal and old-fashioned. I also associate it with more extreme forms of cleaning, like if you're using some kind of a chemical. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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