muckefuck: (Default)
muckefuck ([personal profile] muckefuck) wrote2010-03-11 03:34 pm
Entry tags:

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] 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.

[identity profile] gorkabear.livejournal.com 2010-03-11 10:37 pm (UTC)(link)
Hehe, I have the problem the other way around: you have more than option for that easy action that corresponds to a single word in my mind (go out, exit, leave...)

[identity profile] lhn.livejournal.com 2010-03-11 11:14 pm (UTC)(link)
I wondered why "salire" meaning to go out sounded vaguely right to me, and it eventually came to me: "sally", as in "Sally forth!" and "sally port" (regarding which last, Wikipedia relates "sally" in the military context to "sortie" in the same context, which makes for a nice etymological dovetailing).

Not that that'll help keep track of the sense, since both sally and sortie have fairly narrow uses in English. But a sally port is a particular type of exit, (though its characteristics probably hinge more on its use as an entrance).

[identity profile] embryomystic.livejournal.com 2010-03-12 06:36 am (UTC)(link)
...il soleil est sorti...

Il, le soleil, est sorti?

You probably already know that…

[identity profile] ursine1.livejournal.com 2010-03-12 12:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Salir means "to exit".
Irse means "to leave".
Marcharse means "to go out" and party.
Bajar can mean "to get off" like from a train or bus.
Dejarse can mean "to leave someone".
All of these loosely can be used as "to leave".

Chuck