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Indo-European Hygiene

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outcast
Bilingual Heptaglot
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China
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 Message 1 of 17
23 January 2012 at 8:54pm | IP Logged 
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!


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Jinx
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 Message 2 of 17
23 January 2012 at 9:52pm | IP Logged 
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?
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outcast
Bilingual Heptaglot
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 Message 3 of 17
23 January 2012 at 11:50pm | IP Logged 
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

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Cabaire
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 Message 4 of 17
23 January 2012 at 11:59pm | IP Logged 
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
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 Message 5 of 17
24 January 2012 at 1:59am | IP Logged 
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.
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Serpent
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 Message 6 of 17
24 January 2012 at 8:23am | IP Logged 
Cabaire wrote:
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.
Wow, I didn't even think of стирать, it's a very specific word. To me the distinction is мыть vs чистить, and the former definitely implies using a lot of water. Looooool I was wondering whether it has to do with the words мокрый, мочить (wet - adjective and verb) and didn't even think of the word мыло (soap - I think this one comes from мыть, rather than vice versa.) And it seems like in Russian wash and wet are indeed related.

BTW in English and German it's even more obvious: wash/waschen/water/Wasser :)
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AlephBey
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 Message 7 of 17
24 January 2012 at 8:54am | IP Logged 
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

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ReneeMona
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 Message 8 of 17
24 January 2012 at 10:33am | IP Logged 
Jinx wrote:
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?


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.


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