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Exiting ignorance
It occurs to me that I'm still suffering a mental block from a bad definition I was taught over twenty five years ago. When I began studying Spanish in school (patience, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mlr; I'll get around to writing up the sequence soon), one of the very first words we learned was salir, which was glossed as "to go out". I suspect the reason was to make example sentences like me gusta salir con amigos readily intelligible. Later, when I picked up Catalan and French, I mapped this verb to sortir (either because it was glossed the same way or because I learned very early on that salida = sortida = sortie).
So far, so good. I never noticed my subtle misapprehension until recently when I found myself stymied trying to translate sentences like the sun has come out or I'm waiting for him to come out. I came across il soleil est sorti as a translation of the former and promptly forgot it, since as it came into my recall, I'd tell myself That can't be; sortir is "go out". If only I'd been taught in the first place that salir/sortir really means "exit" (or deduced this from its use on signs) or, better put, "to move from an interior location to an exterior location, regardless of the perspective of the speaker" I could've avoided all this.
mlr; I'll get around to writing up the sequence soon), one of the very first words we learned was salir, which was glossed as "to go out". I suspect the reason was to make example sentences like me gusta salir con amigos readily intelligible. Later, when I picked up Catalan and French, I mapped this verb to sortir (either because it was glossed the same way or because I learned very early on that salida = sortida = sortie).So far, so good. I never noticed my subtle misapprehension until recently when I found myself stymied trying to translate sentences like the sun has come out or I'm waiting for him to come out. I came across il soleil est sorti as a translation of the former and promptly forgot it, since as it came into my recall, I'd tell myself That can't be; sortir is "go out". If only I'd been taught in the first place that salir/sortir really means "exit" (or deduced this from its use on signs) or, better put, "to move from an interior location to an exterior location, regardless of the perspective of the speaker" I could've avoided all this.