I can't believe I've held out from saying things in this thread for so long. (Lingustics student, so I could go on and on...)

  Probably the biggest lexical thing I notice in my area is the complete absence of "lend" from many speakers.  "Hey, can you borrow me a pencil?" is generally the norm.  Also, phonologically, we're smack in the middle of what they call the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.  Here, "bagel" has the "ay" sound in "hate", not the a in "cat".  And something I've noticed on my own is that newscasters on the national news will be talking about the "eeeconomy", whereas we have an "eckonomy"; you get what I mean?

Finally, the language I've done the most work with is Hmong, so here's a tidbit or two from that language.  A lot of the stuff I notice is weird loan translations.  The word for pencil, "cwjmem" literally translated, means something like "lead magic wand".  "Hlub hlau", literally "metal brain", is a computer.  "Ntawv huab cua", "air paper", is email.  "Seem tseej", "leftover spill", is trash in its modern sense, as opposed to an older phrase they used for refuse in agrarian Southeast Asia, which was generally a different kind of stuff.  It's fascinating to see the language try to twist itself around to adjust to a massive shift of environment.  I think my favorite example of this sort of adaptation is how, in Southeast Asia, they didn't orient themselves by north and south in our sense, but used "uphill", farther north into the mountains, and "downhill", south to a lower elevation.  Some Hmong populations here still use them for north and south even though there aren't mountains at all.  Crazy stuff.

Ik heb een appeltje met jou te schillen

Literally: I've got an apple to peel with you.
meaning: I've got some unfinished business with you.

edit: the language is dutch.

Last edited by Notebook Darling (12-27-2008 05:54:54 AM)

Notebook Darling, how lovely this sounds!
About borrowing and lending - well, we have one word instead of two for that in Polish. We just add different prepositions.

I have always found convenient that in English there's solitude and loneliness while in Polish there's one word for both. But, in Polish, there's 2 words that describe jealousy: one of them could be positive or negative, the second one is always destructive and correlated with hate. It's difficult to describe philological nuances but we have also two words to describe disappointment (zawiedziony, rozczarowany). They aren't synonymes but the difference between them is really hard to find.

There's also one Polish word that I find unique: żal. It has few meanings, for example:
1. regret, bitter feeling of disappointment
2. Well, here's a problem. When we feel żal towards someone, it's not only regret. We feel strong concealed bitterness because someone hasn't made sth right or hasn't made what we desired. It usually refers to forlorn relationships.


What's more, we have about 6 nouns for 'rain' and 'rainy weather'. I especially like word that means 'bad weather when snow has turned into the mud'. I know there's a word for this in German (das Schneematsch, das Mansch). How about English?

Epee_724 wrote:

Im surprised no americans posted this goofy chain of words: "You can have your cake and eat it too". Which is to say you cant always get what you want, but the whole idea of cake is to eat it!

We have similiar to this in Polish 'to have a cookie and to eat it'. The idea is the same