Feb. 3rd, 2006 12:04 pm
Funny foreign idioms: Animal antics
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muckefuckI guess here's where I find out if there are more people on f-list who know about raccoon dogs than coon hounds.
Browsing an online Korean dictionary yesterday, I came across the curious expression 너구리 잡는다 /nekwuli capnunta/. The gloss indicates that it's an idiom meaning "There's a lot of cigarette smoke here", but the literal interpretation is a bit more...obscure. For one thing, the verb is transitive, but there's no case marking on the first word, so it could be topic, subject, or object. (Korean likes to leave out any elements, particularly noun phrases, which are recoverable from context.) For another, the verb 잡다 /capta/ has a variety of meanings; basically, it means "grab" or "catch" but, for instance, when the object is an animal, it can be "butcher".
Still, it you forced me to come up with an interpretation, I'd say "[someone] catches raccoon dogs" (since these animals aren't normally considered good eatin'). This makes me wonder if the expression indexes some folksy method of trapping these creatures, which are sometimes hunted for their fur. The Japanese call them tanuki, a name often mistranslated as "badger" or even "fox" since they resemble both. (There's similar idiom, 너구리 굴에서 여우 잡는다 "[someone] catches a fox in a raccoon dog hole", that I find a bit easier to parse even if I can't say exactly what it means.)
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niemandsrose, you've talked to me about tanuki-trapping before--any idea if it was sometimes necessary to smoke them out of their burrows? Also, IIRC, I've seen illustrations of them smoking, though what the connexion could be to that I can scarce imagine.
Browsing an online Korean dictionary yesterday, I came across the curious expression 너구리 잡는다 /nekwuli capnunta/. The gloss indicates that it's an idiom meaning "There's a lot of cigarette smoke here", but the literal interpretation is a bit more...obscure. For one thing, the verb is transitive, but there's no case marking on the first word, so it could be topic, subject, or object. (Korean likes to leave out any elements, particularly noun phrases, which are recoverable from context.) For another, the verb 잡다 /capta/ has a variety of meanings; basically, it means "grab" or "catch" but, for instance, when the object is an animal, it can be "butcher".
Still, it you forced me to come up with an interpretation, I'd say "[someone] catches raccoon dogs" (since these animals aren't normally considered good eatin'). This makes me wonder if the expression indexes some folksy method of trapping these creatures, which are sometimes hunted for their fur. The Japanese call them tanuki, a name often mistranslated as "badger" or even "fox" since they resemble both. (There's similar idiom, 너구리 굴에서 여우 잡는다 "[someone] catches a fox in a raccoon dog hole", that I find a bit easier to parse even if I can't say exactly what it means.)
niemandsrose, you've talked to me about tanuki-trapping before--any idea if it was sometimes necessary to smoke them out of their burrows? Also, IIRC, I've seen illustrations of them smoking, though what the connexion could be to that I can scarce imagine.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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http://www.canids.org/cap/CANID4.pdf
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Thanks for the link, though. I had no idea they'd been introduced to Eastern Europe, much less multiplied to the point where they could be considered "abundant" in Estonia!
Now that I know that Germany is home both to naturalised raccoon dogs and naturalised nutria, I think I need a little liedown.