Aug. 8th, 2011 03:27 pm
When dictionaries fail
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muckefuckI'm back to reading Doris Dörrie again after a pause to finish up The siege of Krishnapur and it reminded me that there's a word she used which I meant to post about before: bonnieren. At first I took this for an aphetic variant of abonnieren "subscribe", but that didn't fit the context, which was of a fast-food worker punching in an order. Even Googling wasn't turning up anything useful so I decided to try a different tack and look up German equivalents for "ring up".
And that's where I started to hit a wall. Phrasal verbs are famously one of the most challenging aspects of English for foreigners, and one of the reason is that they are more polysemous than even native speakers are wont to realise. Find "ring up" in a typical dictionary, and what you'll see is the translation for "call [s.o.] up". I'm aware of this meaning and--even though it's primarily British--I've even been known to use it myself sometimes. But it's not remotely close in meaning.
Another challenging aspect of English is the proliferation of near-synonyms, but the plus side of that is that it means there's often a (usually more formal) alternative which I can look up instead. For "ring up" in the one sense there is--as just mentioned--"call [up]", "telephone", and others. But I couldn't think of a less ambiguous verb with the meaning I wanted. Fortunately, with the help of the LEO discussion forum, I was able to track down that I was dealing with a misspelled variant of "bonieren", which does have the sense I ascribed to it (although it doesn't seem to be nearly as widely-used in German as "ring up" in English).
I had a similar problem going the other way when I attempted to chat up a Polish bear online. At first I thought he was coming on to me since his reply contained the word "połapać" which my dictionary glossed as "make out". Only after I'd pondered the entire sentence for a bit did it occur to me that this meant "make out" in the sense of "discern" and what he was trying to "make out" was what this site which he had only just joined was really good for. (Luckily I figured this out before sending my response!)
The whole language of getting acquainted is fraught with this problems. Mind you, I'm not even talking about slang particularly. It's just that this is an informal activity (who gets "presented" to a potential love interest any more?) and therefore so is much of the associated vocabulary. On one of my language boards, a learner couldn't think of the German for "stand [somebody] up" and so simply left this in English.
I thought that a good equivalent would be "jemandem einen Korb geben" (lit. "give someone a basket"), but upon investigation this turned out to apply to getting turned down (again, try looking that up!) rather than accepted and then blown off. Turns out the word he wanted was versetzen (which also has a range of technical meanings such as "dislocate", "misalign", and "stagger"). Again, it was the LEO forum which set me straight in this case, which shows how lexicography is adapting in the Internet age to solve this problem.
And that's where I started to hit a wall. Phrasal verbs are famously one of the most challenging aspects of English for foreigners, and one of the reason is that they are more polysemous than even native speakers are wont to realise. Find "ring up" in a typical dictionary, and what you'll see is the translation for "call [s.o.] up". I'm aware of this meaning and--even though it's primarily British--I've even been known to use it myself sometimes. But it's not remotely close in meaning.
Another challenging aspect of English is the proliferation of near-synonyms, but the plus side of that is that it means there's often a (usually more formal) alternative which I can look up instead. For "ring up" in the one sense there is--as just mentioned--"call [up]", "telephone", and others. But I couldn't think of a less ambiguous verb with the meaning I wanted. Fortunately, with the help of the LEO discussion forum, I was able to track down that I was dealing with a misspelled variant of "bonieren", which does have the sense I ascribed to it (although it doesn't seem to be nearly as widely-used in German as "ring up" in English).
I had a similar problem going the other way when I attempted to chat up a Polish bear online. At first I thought he was coming on to me since his reply contained the word "połapać" which my dictionary glossed as "make out". Only after I'd pondered the entire sentence for a bit did it occur to me that this meant "make out" in the sense of "discern" and what he was trying to "make out" was what this site which he had only just joined was really good for. (Luckily I figured this out before sending my response!)
The whole language of getting acquainted is fraught with this problems. Mind you, I'm not even talking about slang particularly. It's just that this is an informal activity (who gets "presented" to a potential love interest any more?) and therefore so is much of the associated vocabulary. On one of my language boards, a learner couldn't think of the German for "stand [somebody] up" and so simply left this in English.
I thought that a good equivalent would be "jemandem einen Korb geben" (lit. "give someone a basket"), but upon investigation this turned out to apply to getting turned down (again, try looking that up!) rather than accepted and then blown off. Turns out the word he wanted was versetzen (which also has a range of technical meanings such as "dislocate", "misalign", and "stagger"). Again, it was the LEO forum which set me straight in this case, which shows how lexicography is adapting in the Internet age to solve this problem.
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Ich kenne das Buch nicht, aber in dem mir bekannten Kontext war ein "Bon" (gesprochen "Bong") auch wie ein kleiner Kassenzettel, den der Kellner aber in die Küche oder zum Weinkeller gibt, um überhaupt erst die Ware zu bestellen bzw. zu erhalten, die er dann zum Gast bringt. "Ring up" bezeichnet meines Wissens, die Rechnung für den Gast zusammenzustellen oder fertigzumachen.
*(this is how I'd probably spell it if I had to but I've never seen it in writing)
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Da stand ich baff vorm Bahnhof woertlich stundenlang, sie ist nimmer aufgetaucht, ich bin sitzengelassen worden, musste ich mir selber gestehen. Usw., usf.
Maybe a question for one of your fora? Please let me know if you elect to pose it, and if any useful responses appear. Hab' lieben Dank!
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My nephew was making fun of some German guy who painted a poster-type thing for his girlfriend that said:
"You & I
Forever"
saying it would have to read "You & Me...
I said that the the first version wasn't necessarily wrong.
?
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I was enjoying a gelato in Prague when[*] a young German guy came up and asked me about the grammaticality of his t-shirt. One of his classmates had designed it and it featured a shark leaping from a manhole with the legend "Shit! Outsite!" I gave some rambling response because at first I read "Outsite!" as an attempt at "Out of sight!" rather than "Outside!"
[*] I need to be able to start more sentences this way.
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