1) Alison Flood writes in the Graun about a literary mystery that has apparently been solved:
The word “slut” scrawled at the end of the manuscript for John Steinbeck’s seminal novel The Grapes of Wrath may have been explained, thanks to a handful of Swedish academics. […] But after the Guardian article about the facsimile was published, a handful of Swedish scholars got in touch with Shillinglaw, pointing out the meaning of “slut” in Swedish. “It is the Swedish expression for ‘the end’, used on the last page of all kinds of books, especially children’s books,” wrote Jonathan Shaheen, an academic at Stockholm University, to Shillinglaw. “A well placed ‘slut’ always makes me laugh. I wonder if it might’ve been the same for Steinbeck or his wife, who I believe visited Sweden in 1937. As bookish types they might well have discovered the word. They might even have used it as an inside joke, as I have known other Americans around here to do.”
You can see an image of the MS at the link. Thanks, Michael!
2) Avva (Anatoly Vorobey) posts (in Russian) about Shakespeare’s line (from Macbeth) “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has” and wonders why the different forms of the verb. He consulted a bunch of sources and got no answers; the best suggestion seems to be that Shakespeare just wanted the variation. (“Hath” is noticeably more common in the plays.)
3) I learn (from this very useful Reddit thread) that DeepL is better for the languages it covers than Google Translate; its performance with German is particularly praised. Check it out.
Was it Monty Python who once ended a film sequence in the French manner with FIN – over a photo of a shark’s dorsal fin?
1) “Slut” puzzled me and then cracked me up too, exactly the same.
3) Agree on DeepL. I learned about it through its cousin Linguee, an essential adjunct to a bilingual dictionary. It looks up words and phrases in bilingual texts, and so gives you lots of examples of the desired text and its translation in context, for which dictionaries often are inadequate.
I saw the Steinbeck/slut story the other day and thought it would be of Hattic interest. I am pleased to say that my (subconscious) assumption that it would come to your attention whether or not I send you an email about it proved correct!
Once the Swedish meaning was revealed it seemed straightforward as presumably cognate to German Schluss, but when I actually google I couldn’t quite get direct confirmation of that quickly and couldn’t be bothered to dig into more scholarly sources.
If I had been the author of Macbeth, I absolutely would have been doing it just for the assonance. earth/hath, bubbles/as/has.
I am pleased to say that my (subconscious) assumption that it would come to your attention whether or not I send you an email about it proved correct!
I am now getting notified of relevant stories by direct cortical input, thanks to the nanodevice implanted by my Covid shot.
Google translate’s performance with German is awful.
My first idea was “anything [similar to Google Translate, but] made in Germany will outperform it with German”.
I do not think that German syntax is undefeatable.
And yes, made in Germany.
Do we have specific languages other than German as to which someone knowledgeable-seeming has specifically praised the superiority of DeepL? The “made in Germany” angle provides a plausible basis for it to potentially be better there w/o necessarily being better elsewhere.
Do we have specific languages other than German as to which someone knowledgeable-seeming has specifically praised the superiority of DeepL?
DeepL:
GT:
Somebody’s cribbing?
OK, that’s weird.
Well, 1) it is a well-known text which probably belongs in the traning corpus for both GT and DeepL; 2) it is not unknown for smaller competitors to use a more established engine as their first pass for a search, which they than are trying to improve on. Why not for translation?
Ким Чен Ир с радостью сказал, что сделанную на фабрике зимнюю обувь с высокими голенищами полюбят не только рабочие лесопромышленности, но и живущие в холодных местах люди, и высоко оценил, что ее коллектив завершил много дел.
DL
Kim Jong Il happily said that winter boots with high cuffs made by the factory are loved not only by the forestry workers but also by the people living in cold places, and he praised the fact that the factory staff has completed many works.
GT
Kim Jong Il was delighted to say that the factory-made winter shoes with high tops will be loved not only by workers in the timber industry, but also by people living in cold places, and highly appreciated that her team has completed a lot of work.
GT DeepL comment
My uncle has the most honest rules // My uncle of the most honest rules, // nobody translates this line correctly
When seriously ill, // When he was sick and not in jest, // advantage (small) GT
He made himself respect // He made himself respected // advantage DeepL
And I could not have imagined it better. // And could not think of a better one. // advantage DeepL
His example to others is science; // His example is a lesson to others; // GT? Huh?
But oh my god, what a boredom // But, good heavens, what a bore // draw
Sitting with a sick person day and night, // To sit with a sick man day and night, // draw
Without leaving a single step away! // Without a step out of the way! // draw
What a base deceit // What a low insidiousness // GT
To amuse half-dead // To amuse a half-dead man, // DeepL
To correct his pillows, // To adjust his pillows, // DeepL
It’s sad to bring medicine // To bring the medicine sadly to him, // DeepL
Sigh and think to yourself: // To sigh and think to myself: // GT
When will the devil take you! // When the devil take thee! // GT (thee???)
Overall miserable quality, both of them. But at least no cheating (the word that probably should have been used for translating коварство in this context).
”Do we have specific languages other than German as to which someone knowledgeable-seeming has specifically praised the superiority of DeepL?”
I’ve used both DeepL and GT to attempt translations of some Brazilian Portuguese lyrics.
Both had trouble with some slang expressions, but, overall, DeepL produced consistently idiomatic translations. For common expressions, they can both miss the mark by a bit.
For example, Google rendered ‘Puxa vida!’ as “Oh boy” while Deepl offers “Oh goodness!” for AE and “Oh, Dear!” for BE. I’d go with “For goodness sake!” to include irritation, or “Jesus!” or “Good Lord,” for a more emphatic statement.
One translator’s dictionary offers the following:
my gosh
for Christ sake
man alive
oh man
blimey
geez louise
for god’s sake
Oh, man
Holy moly
Oh my goodness
To get a better sense of the difference between the two machine translators, I tried Vinicius de Moraes’s Cotidiano N° 2. Google committed atrocities, while DeepL was pretty good. Note that the opening line is, intentionally, Spanish rather than PT BR.
Hay dias que no sé lo que me pasa
Eu abro meu Neruda e apago o sol
Misturo poesia com cachaça
e acabo discutindo futebol
Mas não tem na- da, não
Tenho meu vi- o- lão
Acordo de manhã, pão com manteiga
e muito, muito sangue no jornal
aí a criançada toda chega
e eu chego a achar Herodes natural
Mas não tem na- da, não
Tenho meu vi- o- lão
Depois faço a loteca com a patroa
quem sabe nosso dia vai chegar
e rio porque rico ri à toa
também não custa nada imaginar
Mas não tem na- da, não
tenho meu vi- o- lão
Mas não tem na- da, não
tenho meu vi- o- lão
Aos sábados em casa tomo um porre
e sonho soluções fenomenais
mas quando o sono vem a noite morre
o dia conta histórias sempre iguais
Mas não tem na- da, não
tenho meu vi- o- lão
Às vezes quero crer, mas não consigo,
é tudo uma total insensatez
Aí pergunto a Deus: “Escute, amigo,
se foi pra desfazer por que é que fez?”
Mas não tem na- da, não
tenho meu vi- o- lão
Mas não tem na- da, não
GT-
It’s been a day that’s not gone by
I open my Neruda and turn off the sun
I mix poetry with cachaça
and I end up discussing football
But there’s nothing, no
I have my vi- o-loo
Wake up in the morning, bread and butter
and a lot, a lot of blood in the newspaper
then all the kids arrive
and I even find Herod natural
But there’s nothing, no
I have my vi- o-loo
Then I do the lotca with the boss
maybe our day will come
and laugh because rich laughs for nothing
it doesn’t hurt to imagine either
But there’s nothing, no
I have my vi- o-loo
But there’s nothing, no
I have my vi- o-loo
On Saturdays at home I get drunk
and dream phenomenal solutions
but when sleep comes the night dies
the day tells stories always the same
But there’s nothing, no
I have my vi- o-loo
Sometimes I want to believe, but I can’t,
it’s all total nonsense
Then I ask God: “Listen, friend,
if you went to undo why did you do it?”
But there’s nothing, no
I have my vi- o-loo
But there’s nothing, no
DeepL-
Hay dias que no sé lo que me pasa
I open my Neruda and turn off the sun
I mix poetry with cachaça
and end up discussing soccer
But there is nothing, no
I have my vi- o- lion
I wake up in the morning, bread and butter
and lots and lots of blood in the newspaper
then all the kids arrive
and I even find Herod natural
But there is nothing, no
I have my vi- o- lion
Then I’ll do the lottery with the missus
who knows our day will come
and laugh because rich laughs for nothing
it also costs nothing to imagine
But there is nothing, no
I have my vi- o- lion
But there is nothing, no
I have my vi- o- lion
On Saturdays at home I get drunk
and dream phenomenal solutions
but when sleep comes the night dies
the day always tells the same stories
But there is nothing, no
I have my vi- o- lion
Sometimes I want to believe, but I can’t,
it’s all total nonsense
Then I ask God, “Listen, my friend,
if it was to undo why did you do it?”
But there is nothing, no
I have my vi- o- lion
But there is nothing, no
They both dealt with violão(guitar) as it was written in the original lyric, Vi-o-lão.
DeepL doesn’t do Welsh. Need I say more?
No.
Whereof one cannot speak in Welsh, thereof one must be silent.
I somehow feel like a thing called Deep-whatever is going to end up trying to translate me, or something equally disturbing.
I tried DeepL on several samples of German. As cuchuflete wrote about Portuguese samples, it produced consistently idiomatic translations.
Even from a typical sample of hoity-toity mumbo-jumbo in German, DeepL produced reasonable h-t m-j in English. But, for some reason, it sometimes tries to interpret linebreaks as new sentences, and then repeats itself.
German [copied out of a PDF, thus the formatting]
# Der Versuch, die
zum Teil frappierend ähnlichen, teilweise aber auch stark divergierenden Zugangsweisen zeitgenössischer Theoriebildungen zur Differenzsetzung unter einen Hut zu bringen, schlug sich selbstredend in
dem Untertitel des Projektansuchens “Geschlechterforschung als
transdisziplinäre Beobachtung und Performanz von Differenz” nieder. #
This becomes
# The attempt to reconcile the
The attempt to reconcile the partly strikingly similar, but partly also strongly diverging approaches of contemporary theorizing on the setting of difference was of course reflected in the
the subtitle of the project application “Gender studies as a transdisciplinary
transdisciplinary observation and performance of difference”. #
“was reflected” is good for schlug sich nieder, which might be taken to mean “deal yourself a sucker-punch”.
But I’ve tracked down the ‘slutt’ (in Norwegian spelling) that was on the tip of my mind – it’s Lillebjorn Nilsen’s Gategutt
I krematoriet skal min hvite ild
til slutt.
Which has nothing to do with Steinbeck, but is a relief to me!
But, for some reason, it sometimes tries to interpret linebreaks as new sentences, and then repeats itself.
I had the same thing happen with Russian input.
All languages are Welsh (even if they don’t know it). Therefore it does Welsh.
Swedish slut and German Schluss: according to the Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen edited under the direction of Wolfgang Pfeifer, Schluss (Middle Low German slut) is a late medieval derivation from schließen (“to close”), a verb which is apparently missing from North and East Germanic. So if the Swedish word is in any way related, it must be a Low German loan.
You got me excited about the website, but they don’t have Vietnamese…
Or Thomas Middleton (who apparently is responsible for the version of Macbeth we have), or a scribe, or the typesetter.
they don’t have Vietnamese
How is GT for Vietnamese?
Shakespeare (or whoever) was apparently not pursuing a consistent strategy in favor of “elegant variation” to avoid repeating a word within the same line, as witness elsewhere in Macbeth where repetition has an aesthetic effect of its own:
That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold;
What hath quench’d them hath given me fire.
OTOH, there’s also no taboo against using the minority variant in consecutive lines:
She has spoke what she should not, I am sure of
that: heaven knows what she has known.
It’s probably too small a sample size to find it significant that while “hath” is almost three times as common as “has” in the play as a whole, “has” is more common (two instances to one) in line-final position.
But note the use of both in this little exchange where one is line-final and the other isn’t:
MACBETH
Hath he ask’d for me?
LADY MACBETH
Know you not he has?
For Suffolk, he that can do all in all
With her that hateth thee and hates us all
(2 Henry VI, II.4)
Well, unlike “hath” v. “has,” the differences between “hateth” and “hates” include two syllables versus one, which seems relevant to understanding the wording choice in the Henry VI line.
I’ve read somewhere that the spelling “hath” still appeared pretty constantly for some time after the actual pronunciation had consistently changed to “has” in the seventeenth century (likewise “doth/does.”) I’m not sure quite how one could be certain of this, but it this was already a thing for Shakespeare, conceivably this might just be a question of fluctuating spelling (hardly unusual for the period) rather than actual variation. As JWB points out, there’s no metrical difference in these words to confirm that it’s real-life variation.
@DE, well you could look for line-final instances of both variations in the subset of the Shakespearian corpus that rhymes and see what has/hath are rhymed with. Although I guess it’s possible that even if the default pronunciation-regardless-of-spelling was already “has” you could throw out a hath-pronounced-as-such variant pronunciation to force a rhyme to work. Worse hath been done in the service of doggerel over the centuries. Of course in modern AmEng* “has” is a more difficult one to rhyme and Shakespeare didn’t even have access to candidates like “jazz” and “razzmatazz.”
*Do “hath” and “bath” rhyme for foreigners without the BATH/TRAP merger? Although of course Shakespeare’s vowels did not necessarily match either current AmEng or current BrEng.
Y,
Google Translate is quite bad for Vietnamese, though it could be because Vietnamese & English are very different (GT isn’t too bad for English-Norwegian, for example). That’s why I wanted to check another website.
The -s forms start appearing in the later plays. The earliest ones have only -th forms.
Separately, when you click through to the Russian discussion of Macbeth hat linked to, you see a shot of what I think is a First Folio facsimile where the line ends “as the Water ha’s.” What the heck is that apostrophe doing there? It doesn’t seem like it should be marking an elided letter-and-maybe-phoneme like the “vanish’d” in the next line. A random one-off, or a common usage of the time with which I was not previously familiar?
I used DeepL to translate an Italian paper from a conference. I did it because my Italian is slow, but it’s good enough for me to tell that it was a very good translation that needed only a little editing of awkwardnesses. One caveat: the translation of most of the paper was fine, but I’m a medievalist, as is the author of the paper, and there were a few fifteenth-century quotations, which DeepL did not handle well. Since Dante’s language is even earlier, perhaps that has a bearing on the mysterious duplication.
What the heck is that apostrophe doing there?
He wonders about that too, and if you scroll about halfway down the page you’ll see a screenshot (in English) from the Twelfth Night Arden ed. (Third Series), which says that “ha’s” is an idiosyncrasy of Compositor B.
I must say that “Compositor B” is a rather humdrum name for a historical personage of unknown actual name, contrasting unfavorably with the likes of the painter known as “Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece.”
The Master of the Inexplicable Apostrophe.
Perhaps Compositor B had a second job as a grocer.
He did the placards for the theater: SHAKESPEARE: HE HA’S THE BEST PLAY’S!
The opportunities are endless:
Love’s Labor’s Lost
Alls Well That End’s Well
Pericle’s
The Merry Wive’s of Windsor
etc etc
Compositor B presumably conjugates to have as have(s) haves(t) haves and writes the h, even though it is not pronounced, because he is a man of some heducation.
Henry the Sick’sth
…the Sixt, actually, and the Fift. The analogy that created the impressive fricative clusters happened later.
MHG still had long and short forms of the whole paradigm of this and a few other verbs. Standard German has picked forms more or less at random to create a single paradigm for haben, while Alemannic is famous in narrow circles for its Kurzverben. Even outside Alemannic, the 1sg present is not (a direct cognate of) habe in some dialects, but han.
Jamie the Saxt
Somebody’s cribbing? (Dante comparison)
Can anybody repeat that? I got significantly different results from Google, and slightly different results from DeepL, assuming you entered the same 9 lines in Italian, with linebreaks. Google failed hard on line 4: “Ouch as to say what it was is hard thing”, vs. DeepL’s “How hard it is to say what it was”.
And I doubt they would use poetry in the training corpus for a modern language, especially medieval poetry. In any case, these lines couldn’t have been slurped from a corpus (though some are close to existing translations): no human would write “little is more death” instead of “death is little more”, and no human would translate line 9 as “things I have stored there” instead of “things I have seen there”.
ktschwarz: I tried again, and got what you got. The “forest dark” is now “dark forest”, too. The training corpuses must have changed since this morning. Maybe I ran it before they had had their coffee.
Line breaks don’t make a difference, though that’s certainly not a given.
Maybe you accidentally copy-pasted DeepL’s English output into GT’s input box, instead of the Italian?
We’ll never know now.
syntax – I meant, German word order drives Google mad:(
I posted this above without clarification:
DL: Kim Jong Il happily said that winter boots with high cuffs made by the factory are loved not only by the forestry workers but also by the people living in cold places, and he praised the fact that the factory staff has completed many works.
GT: Kim Jong Il was delighted to say that the factory-made winter shoes with high tops will be loved not only by workers in the timber industry, but also by people living in cold places, and highly appreciated that her team has completed a lot of work.
What I meant: DL substituted “her” from the original with “factory”. In Russian this “her” could be substituted with “of factory”. Here and in some other places DL behaves as if it studied syntax.
Whcih can explain why people say it is better.
It would be interesting to find some tough Chinese text (a text where they both produce difficult to read output) and see, who is better.
DeepL’s page in Chinese Wikipedia, unfortunately, is more or less readable in both. Persian and Arabic can be fairly difficult for Google, but I want semantic horror.
Ouch. It does not even have Persian. Only: Japanese, Chinese, and Euro-Finno-Ugric.
Better to do a few things well than many badly.
I have a friend who translates Chinese to English. I recommended Deep L to him, and he definitely found it superior to Google Translate.
(Sure, he’s supposed to do all the translating himself, but a good machine translation can help save a lot of time.)
It was not a criticism, it just limits our testing opportunities:)
As for usability, two very meaningful directions of expansion are: (1) covering langauges that GT does not cover (2) improving results for German, Arabic etc. Both times you are unique. I do not expect machine learning guys to take much interest in the former (they are not linguists and obtaining a corpus is an issue). I also do not expect them to start from the latter but for a different reason. I am grateful anyway.
If it is good for German, they have already improved lives of some people like me (I still try to decipher German, and when I use GT I am even glad that the translation is incomplete, but anyway). Persian would have improved lives of many Persian speakers maybe, who, famously, are not good at English, while with Indic it looks commercially viable. Persians can’t send / receive money from/in Iran wihtout танцы с бубном even when they have money:-(
when I use GT I am even glad that the translation is incomplete
Because it gives you a chance to exercise your imagination and creativity?
I am not “learning” German, but I am doing it the same way as I was not learning English and French in 90s. If I still have to look at the German text, translate some words and process German word order on my own it still, maybe, amounts to reading a (very) simplified German text or using an analytical tool. I learn at least something new. And the temptation to use it more often is less strong:)
P.S. My approach have always been “if I want to learn somethign, I read it” – at least for European Indo-European. That is, not to be afraid of langauges I do not know.
I am not sure if the goal was learning anything… rather I did not want to limit my reading, and also I enjoy the process.
Machine translation does serve the former goal (not limiting myself with Russian texts), but it ruins the second part (enjoying the process). So I try to find some balance, and for every language I do it differently.
“Ruins” is an exaggeration: the feeling of freedom, that I can read in Dutch and ignore the fact that I have never “studied” it and am not “supposed” to even try – this feeling is now, hopefully, familiar to many users of GT who chose to ignore cultural borders.
If they are borders of cultural ignorance, “choice” is not an option. Here freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
I find it quite hard to say “With her that hateth thee” three times fast
I can report that, as you might expect, both engines translate the canonical sentences
“My hovercraft is full of eels”
and
“My nipples explode with delight”
competently into Hungarian. But Google Translate is better on the second one, converting ‘nipples’ to the singular, as is usual for paired body parts. This suggests to me that DeepL, at least, is translating unseen; you’d think they would have these in their corpus.
Well, Chinese Wikipedia about somethin (I hope) less translatable:
DL:
A Q “mostly lived in Wei Zhuang, but also often stayed elsewhere, can not be said to be Wei Zhuang people, even to say that “Wei Zhuang people also”, but still there is a violation of the historical law”, all alone, poor, often work for Zhao Tai Ye short work, but often treated harshly by Zhao Tai Ye. He was often treated harshly by Mrs. Zhao. He was often looked down upon, but Q often used the “spiritual victory method” to comfort himself.
One day, Ah Q is beaten up by a despised Wang Hu and a disgusting fake foreign devil. When he was angry, he met a little nun. A Q mocked up a bit, made people laugh, and only then to express their feelings. However, Q thought about spring and stayed up all night thinking about it. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to its customers. The family used this to extort money from Q and stopped giving him work. Since then, all the work of the Zhao family was given to D. A Q suffered a lot of hunger and cold and pawned all his belongings. When he finally decided to go out to seek food, he arrived at the meditation nunnery and plucked a few old radishes, but was chased by black dogs and was in great trouble. At this point, Ah Q decided to enter the city. After some days, when people saw Q dressed in bright clothes, they all flattered Q. People’s attitude changed and they asked him for goods in the city, but later they learned that Q had entered the city to be a thief, and they no longer feared him.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)GT:
Ah Q “lives more in Weizhuang, but often stays elsewhere. I can’t say that he is from Weizhuang. Even if he is from Weizhuang, he still has a history of obedience.” Doing part-time job, but often treated harshly by Mrs. Zhao. On weekdays, people look down on him more often, but Ah Q uses the “spiritual victory method” to comfort himself.
One day, Ah Q provokes the despised Wang Hu again, and ran into a nasty fake foreign devil, and was beaten up. Just when he was indignant, he greeted the little nun. Ah Q molested him, and only after he made people laugh, he had to express his feelings. But Ah Q thought about spring here, staying up all night, thinking about it wildly. Another day, Ah Q was pounding rice in the Zhao’s family, and he was rude to Wu Ma, a female worker in the Zhao’s family. The Zhao family used this to extort Ah Q for money, not to mention no more work for him. Since then, Zhao’s work has been handed over to Xiao D. Ah Q spent many days starving and catching the cold, pawning all his belongings. Finally decided to go out for food, and when he arrived at Jingxiu Nunnery, he pulled out a few old turnips, but was chased by a black dog in embarrassment. At this time, Ah Q was determined to enter the city. After a few days, when people saw Ah Q was dressed well, they all flattered Ah Q. People’s attitudes changed and they all asked him for goods from the city, but later learned that Ah Q had entered the city as a thief and no longer feared him.
Head louse (Wiki, Finnish)
Päätäi (Pediculus humanus var. capitis) on väiveiden ja täiden lahkoon kuuluva 2–3 mm pitkä siivetön hyönteislaji, joka loisii ihmisissä. Nykytietämyksen mukaan se on vaatetäin (Pediculus humanus var. humanus) kanssa samaa lajia eikä muodosta edes alalajin tasoista taksonia. Kuoriutumisen jälkeen täi voi olla hyvin vaalea tai melkein musta. Täin väri riippuu usein hiusten väristä.
GT
The head lice (Pediculus humanus var. Capitis) is a 2-3 mm long wingless insect species belonging to the order of lice and lice that parasites in humans. According to current knowledge, it is of the same species as the garland (Pediculus humanus var. Humanus) and does not even form a subspecies-level taxon. After hatching, the lice can be very pale or almost black. The color of the lice often depends on the color of the hair.
GL
The head louse (Pediculus humanus var. capitis) is a 2-3 mm long wingless insect of the lice and aphid order that parasitises humans. According to current knowledge, it is the same species as the cassava (Pediculus humanus var. humanus) and does not even form a subspecies taxon. After hatching, the lice may be very pale or almost black. The colour of the lice often depends on the colour of the hair.
väiveiden (gen. pl. of väive) ‘sucking louse’ (Mallophaga)
GT
lice
GL
aphid
kanssa = (together) with
GT
garland
GL
cassava (Where is my tucupi?)
vaatetäi ‘body louse’
Re ‘Slut’
The archetypal Swedish fairytale ends with the nonsense-verse ‘snipp snapp snut – så var sagan slut’ (roughly ‘bing bang bend – the story comes to an end.’)
The novel ‘The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared’ has a minor sub-plot where a disillusioned typesetter adds that as a last verse to a batch of bibles. In the English translation it becomes ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’
It doesn’t quite carry the same connotations – but it’s a neat ending.
snipp snapp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxfxAlIO6HU
Toen hij voor de huisdeur stond, dacht hij: Er is geen enkele geldige reden, waarom deze avond zou moeten mislukken. Ik heb een vermoeden dat hij slaagt. Een avond waarvan het verloop van te voren vaststaat, kan onmogelijk een mislukking worden. Men dient zich niets meer voor te stellen, dan verwacht kan worden, dat is alles.
DeepL
As he stood at the house door, he thought: There is no valid reason why this evening should fail. I have a suspicion that it will succeed. An evening of which the course is determined in advance cannot possibly be a failure. One should not imagine anything more than can be expected, that is all.
GT
As he stood at the front door, he thought: There is no valid reason why this evening should fail. I suspect he will succeed. An evening whose course is predetermined cannot possibly turn out to be a failure. One should not imagine anything more than can be expected, that is all.
Note:
1. GT has “he will succeed”. Even though the cognate Abend is also “he” in German, DeepL has correctly “it”.
2. Both GT and DeepL translate “zou moeten mislukken” as “should fail”, rather than “should have to fail” or “should really fail”. I do not feel my knowledge of Dutch is sufficient to say they are wrong.
3. This book “de Avonden” was published in 1947 but the first translation in English appeared in 2016. I do not know what the translator did here.
In Russian it is Снип-снап-снурре from “Snow queen” written by Evgeny Schwartz as a retelling of the Andersen’s story. Whether Andersen used that expression as some magical phrase, I do not know.
Whether Andersen used that expression
He sure did:
“Og snip-snap-snurre-basselurre!” sagde røverpigen,
https://www.andersenstories.com/da/andersen_fortaellinger/snedronningen
Well, here is the same passage from that 2016 translation by Sam Garrett (The Evenings: A Winter’s Tale):
Varieties and other “infrasubspecific taxa” have not been recognized in zoological nomenclature in decades.
The archetypal Swedish fairytale ends with the nonsense-verse ‘snipp snapp snut – så var sagan slut’
I thought, aha, that must the source of “Snip snap snout, this tale’s told out”, which appears occasionally in English; pretty sure I saw it at the end of a fairytale in childhood. But no; as best I can tell, its earliest appearance in English was in George William Dasent’s 1859 translation of Asbjørnsen and Moe’s fairytale collection, at the end of “The Three Billy-Goats Gruff”, where the Norwegian text has “Og snipp snapp snute, saa er det eventyret ute.”
Wiktionary says slut was borrowed from Swedish into Danish, where it’s used in radio communications for “over and out”.
George William Dasent
I looked up this name, and found this:
In this form, it’s pronounced /ˈdeɪsᵊnt/ (DAY-snt).
That should be George Webbe Dasent. I miscopied.
Interesting — according to his Wikipedia page, his translation of Njal’s Saga “established sustained interest in Icelandic literature.” (They don’t say where that Webbe came from, though.)
@tm
Thanks. I have one other small point. For “geen enkele geldige reden”, the two machine translators have “no valid reason” and Sam Garrett has “no single, valid reason”. I would suggest “not one valid reason” or “not a single valid reason” but agree that “NO valid reason” would be equivalent (it is hard to put a fingerstab with optional raising of the voice in writing).
OK, here’s a definite triumph of DeepL:
I’m particularly impressed with the correct “herringbone,” which a human translator could easily screw up.
On the topic of the word herringbone: Last month, I was looking at pictures of some fossils with my sons, and I pointed out that the very old (Ediacaran period) fossil Spriggina, in spite of looking very much like an arthropod, was probably something quite different. Like a number of fossils from the Ediacaran (e.g. Dickinsonia, which I think displays the weird traits most clearly), the segmentation is not actually symmetric across the midline. Rather than having a bilateral reflection symmetry, these organisms have glide reflection symmetries with staggered* isomers. I described this to my sons as a “herringbone pattern,” which it is. However, it occurred to me that the specific feature of the pattern that I was pointing out was not actually a feature of literal herring bones (fish like herring being, of course, bilaterians).
* For some reason, it took me a while to come up with the word staggered here, and I’m still not positive that there isn’t a better word that I overlooked.
Oh, it gets weirder still. Dickinsonia is symmetric on the lower side – it’s just the upper side that is staggered.
” is certainly debatable.” – So English does not have a word for “заведомо”:( Once in a while I want to use it, mostly for stylistical reasons. Something like before-knownly:
“One sees that attributing this pottery to the Catacomb culture is going to be ‘debatable’ even before testing it”,
where “testing” can be
– considering it and coming to the conclusion on one’s own
– proposing it and hearing the objections
In other situations “even before an experiment”, as in “… losing tactics/strategy” in games.
@drasvi
I am sure foreseeably exists, although it sounds “clunky” to me and too strong for many contexts, i.e. for me “It could have been foreseen (was foreseeable) that X would commit another crime if released” is OK but not “It could have been foreseen that X would arrive ten minutes late for the train”
For заведомо my Oxford dictionary says: “wittingly; (+adj.) known to be; з. зная being fully aware; передать з. необоснованный слух to pass on a rumour known to be unfounded.”
Wiktionary says:
Not exactly belonging on this thread, but still interesting:
The race to find India’s hidden languages
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211014-the-man-who-found-indias-hidden-languages
Fascinating, with very interesting links in it! I had no idea of the Tangsa script, for example.
Jen: Lillebjorn Nilsen’s Gategutt
Rudolf Nilsen‘s poem Gategutt, made into a song and recorded by Lillebjørn Nilsen.
Epigrams may be even harder than poetry.
My test case is “Ikh vel zayn batrayt,” which is the tagline on somebody’s Tumblr blog. I thought it might be Yiddish in a possibly nonstandard romanization.
Google Translate: Russian, “They were led by Zayn Butright” (Where did they get “butright”, which on the web seems to occur mainly as an OCR error for “outright” or “but right”?)
DeepL: Slovenian, “I am the son of a batrayt”
Both of those are obviously wrong.
Maybe it was a phonetic rendering of something whose standard German spelling would be more like “Ich wehl sein betreit.”
Google Translate: Luxembourgish (at least we are in the High German family), “I choose to be cared for”
DeepL: German, “I wehl his betreit”
Maybe the original quote has a typo. Does anyone here know?
“They were led by Zayn Butright”
Well, certainly, if we translate that back into (transliterated) Russian, we do in fact get what GT started with (modulo capitalization). I’m not sure why “Butright” as opposed to (e.g.) “Butrite” though – and for that matter why not “Zine”.
(Google finds several real people surnamed Butrite, and a few more surnamed Butright. Maybe one of them was famous enough to make it into a Russian source.)
As you guessed, try betrayt.
For German, I’d go with ich will betreut werden, “I want to be cared for”.
Allan from Iowa, are you sure it’s “Ikh vel zayn batrayt”, not “ikh vel zayn bafrayt”, I want to be freed, איך וויל זיין באפרייט
Another triumph of DeepL:
Very impressive, since Новый Завет is not formally marked as accusative (so of course GT took it as a subject).
I’ve been trying to read Professor Riddle’s Chronicles in GT lately, so for comparison, a (somewhat long-ish, sorry) excerpt from the first chapter…
Original:
Здравствуйте, дети! Нет, я не поморщился, с чего вы взяли? Мне не приходилось бегать от алиментов, мистер Уизли. А вот вам, если я хоть что-то понимаю в пророчествах, от них сбежать не удастся. Звезды ясно говорят, что у вас будет не менее семи детей.
Кто-нибудь, приведите Молли Прюэтт в чувство. При чем тут мадам Помфри? Вы что, не знаете водного заклинания? Акваменти! Не надо тут мне отнекиваться, что это программа шестого курса. Пффф! Господа Крэбб и Гойл, похоже, заклинание уже выучили. Пять баллов со Слизерина. И да – акваменти! Я, между прочим, знаю осушающее заклинание, а вы двое, похоже, нет.
Переходим к теме урока. Да, я также известен как лорд Вольдеморт. Нет, мисс Блэк, в классе попрошу называть меня профессор Риддл. Мистер Уизли, я все слышал. К вашему сведению, мое общение с учениками не выходит за пределы класса. Пять баллов с Гриффиндора.
GT:
Hello children! No, I didn’t frown, where did you get the idea? I haven’t had to run from child support, Mr. Weasley. But for you, if I understand at least something in the prophecies, you will not be able to escape from them. The stars clearly say that you will have at least seven children.
Someone bring Molly Pruette to her senses. What does Madam Pomfrey have to do with it? Don’t you know the water spell? Aquamenti! There is no need for me to deny that this is a sixth year program. Pfff! Messrs. Crabbe and Goyle seem to have learned the spell by now. Five points from Slytherin. And yes – aquaments! I know a drying spell, by the way, but you two don’t seem to be.
Moving on to the topic of the lesson. Yes, I am also known as Lord Voldemort. No, Miss Black, I’m going to ask you to call me Professor Riddle in class. Mr. Weasley, I heard everything. For your information, my communication with students does not go outside the classroom. Five points from Gryffindor.
DeepL:
Hello, children! No, I didn’t wince, what makes you think that? I’ve never had to run away from alimony, Mr. Weasley. But you, if I know anything about prophecy, can’t run away from it. The stars are clear that you will have at least seven children.
Somebody bring Molly Pruett to her senses. What’s Madame Pomfrey got to do with it? Don’t you know the water spell? Aquamenti! Don’t give me that sixth grade program. Pfft! Gentlemen Crabbe and Goyle seem to have learned the spell. Five points from Slytherin. And yes – aquamenti! I, by the way, know the draining spell, but you two don’t seem to.
Moving on to the topic of the lesson. Yes, I am also known as Lord Voldemort. No, Miss Black, in class, I will ask you to call me Professor Riddle. Mr. Weasley, I heard that. For your information, my interactions with students do not extend beyond the classroom. Five points from Gryffindor.
…Various points to both, often in the same sentences. Neither recognized the name “Molly Prewett”. The last paragraph was definitely in DeepL’s favor, though.
Interesting result: “Не надо тут мне отнекиваться, что это программа шестого курса” actually means something like “Don’t you here retort [to me] that it’s sixth-year material”. Neither GT nor DeepL, it seems, had recognized the word отнекиваться “to refuse, retort”, though at least GT had produced something grammatically sensible.
Yes, that is interesting; you could actually interpret “Don’t give me that” as “Don’t retort to me that it’s” if you were a defense lawyer for DL, but it’s probably just a failed attempt at analysis.
but it’s probably just a failed attempt at analysis
Probably. Again, GT’s analysis makes sense, because the original Russian is grammatically ambiguous over who’s doing the retorting (it’s mostly the context, and/or pragmatics, that provides the interpretation I gave) – i.e. perhaps it did recognize the word but misunderstood what its subject was. Meanwhile DL’s version of the sentence is so compressed that it’s hard to tell what, if anything, was recognized at all.
Well, translating ethical dative is not going to be easy, is it? I am not sure what a human translator would do with it. Let me try (not much of a translator, but human). Не надо тут мне отнекиваться, что это программа шестого курса. — Don’t try to talk out of it on me because it is the sixth grade level.
Here’s a later fragment from the same chapter, with internal thoughts instead of dialogue, so longer and more complicated sentences…
Original:
Темная магия всегда привлекала меня стройностью и оригинальностью ее теоретической части. Проследить за тонкой нитью изящных преобразований, описывающих механизм и действие заклятия, дано не каждому, но знающие люди получают от этого истинное наслаждение. Если, разумеется, воображение не рисует им чересчур живые картины того, что стоит за всеми этими милыми формулами. Особо впечатлительных от этого даже тошнит, и таких не берут в Пожиратели.
На уроке на седьмом курсе я не мог отказать себе в удовольствии объяснить студентам, как на самом деле работает темная магия. Во время первой попытки я был просто счастлив: надо же, до чего хладнокровные и циничные дети мне попались. Просто душа моя на радостях развернулась и в ряд Тейлора на хоркруксы разложилась. На следующем занятии я пошел дальше и даже вывел характеристическую функцию Круциатуса. И только на третьем уроке я понял, что молчание моих ягнят объясняется отнюдь не их железными нервами, а их пустыми головами.
GT:
Dark magic has always attracted me with the harmony and originality of its theoretical part. It is not given to everyone to follow the thin thread of graceful transformations describing the mechanism and operation of the spell, but knowledgeable people get real pleasure from this. Unless, of course, the imagination paints them too vivid pictures of what is behind all these cute formulas. Especially impressionable from this even sick, and such are not taken into the Death Eaters.
In my seventh year class, I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure of explaining to students how dark magic actually works. During the first attempt, I was just happy: wow, how cold-blooded and cynical children I came across. It’s just that my soul turned around for joy and disintegrated into Taylor’s row into Horcruxes. In the next lesson, I went further and even deduced the characteristic function of the Cruciatus. And only in the third lesson I realized that the silence of my lambs is not explained by their iron nerves, but by their empty heads.
DL:
Dark magic has always attracted me by the slenderness and originality of its theoretical part. Not everyone can follow the delicate thread of elegant transformations that describe the mechanism and action of a spell, but knowledgeable people really enjoy it. Unless, of course, their imagination draws them too vivid pictures of what’s behind all those cute formulas. The particularly impressionable are even sickened by it, and they don’t get hired as Reavers.
In my seventh year class, I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure of explaining to students how dark magic really works. The first time I tried it, I was happy to see how cold-blooded and cynical the kids were. My soul was just happy to unfold into a row of Taylor’s Horcruxes. In the next class I went further and even deduced the characteristic function of Cruciatus. It was only at the third lesson that I realized that the silence of my lambs was not due to their iron nerves, but to their empty heads.
GT recognized “Death Eaters”, though seemingly mostly by accident. Neither recognized “Taylor series”, but GT made less of a mess out of the result. DL’s “slenderness” is a miss. Overall, though, slight advantage to DL.
Пффф – Pfff – Pfft
wifty drifty!
—
drifty was not very transparent reference to ktschwarz It’s sound-symbolic enough that I could almost guess what it meant (never having heard it before), especially in context: similar to wift, whiff, waft, drift, woozy. in Wifty
DL:
Wifty – это синоним слова “ditzy”. И, как и слово “ditzy”, его происхождение остается неизвестным. Самое раннее известное печатное появление слова “wifty” – это цитата, появившаяся в газете Delaware County Daily Times (Честер, Пенсильвания) в 1972 году, хотя в разговорном английском это слово, безусловно, использовалось и до этого. Слово “Ditzy”, похоже, почти такое же старое, как “wifty” – мы можем отследить его по крайней мере до 1974 года. Но “dizzy”, которое в своем древнеанглийском происхождении означало “глупый” или “тупой”, использовалось в значении, похожем на “ditzy” или “wifty”, с 16 века.
GT:
Wifty – это синоним слова «тупица». И, как и «головокружительный», его происхождение остается неизвестным. Самое раннее известное печатное слово «wifty» встречается в цитате, появившейся в Delaware County Daily Times (Честер, Пенсильвания) в 1972 году, хотя это слово определенно использовалось в разговорной речи до этого. «Ditzy» кажется почти таким же старым, как и «wifty» – мы можем проследить его происхождение, по крайней мере, с 1974 года. смысл, похожий на «дитзи» или «женатый» с 16 века.
DL certainly seems better there.
Yes. When I feed “But “dizzy,” which in its Old English origins meant “foolish” or “stupid,” has been used in a sense similar to “ditzy” or “wifty” since the 16th century. ” to GT:
Но слово «головокружение», которое в его древнеанглийском происхождении означало «глупый» или «глупый», использовалось в смысле, аналогичном «тупому» или «тупому» с 16 века.
That is: DeepL can translate dictionaries. The original is the dictionary entry from ktschwarz’s post:
Wifty is a synonym of “ditzy.” And, like “ditzy,” its origins remain unknown. The earliest known print appearance of “wifty” is in a quotation that appeared in the Delaware County Daily Times (Chester, Pennsylvania) in 1972, though the word was certainly being used in spoken English before that. “Ditzy” appears to be almost as old as “wifty”—we are able to trace it back to at least 1974. But “dizzy,” which in its Old English origins meant “foolish” or “stupid,” has been used in a sense similar to “ditzy” or “wifty” since the 16th century.
He translates “ditzy” and “wifty” as ‘a word “
ditzy“‘ and ‘a word “wifty“‘, which is in some cases necessary in Russian.He (well, it is “it”, but I am tired) translates ‘meant “foolish” or “stupid,” ‘ as ‘meant “foolish” or “stupid,”’, and in this case he translates the words in quotemarks.
D.O., thanks for the correction.
Google Translate still makes a mess of it, but DeepL doesn’t pretend to know what it means.
Yiddish is not one of the languages DeepL covers.
A few years ago someone (maybe in this very group, I don’t remember) commented that Google Translate did a remarkably good job with Hausa. I checked, and they were right: all the samples of Hausa I found on the BBC’s Hausa site came out as perfectly intelligible and almost idiomatic English. At that time Google Translate did a remarkably bad job with French and Spanish. However, that was a few years ago and it’s become a lot better with French and Spanish.
It was you, back in 2015!
BBC’s Hausa site
I suspect* that this variety is more Anglified than both French and some other Hausas. And:
P.S. *what matters here is this specific suspiction that can be totally wrong. And I see how Hausa can be easy. Otherwise, of course, using BBC just puts Hausa in the same position as Arabic.
OK, but I didn’t make the original observation myself. I must have read it somewhere.
Check out your 2016 comment in the same thread and David Eddyshaw’s responses.
“Ikh vel zayn batrayt,” which is the tagline on somebody’s Tumblr blog.”
נישטאָ אין יִידיש אַזאַ װאָרט װי “באַטרײַט.” אפֿשר האָט דער מענטש געװאָלט זאָגן “כ׳װעל זײַן געטרײַ.
= Yidish has no such word as “batrayt.” Maybe the person meant getray ‘faithful, loyal’.
@dlg
I think DP’s suggestion above looked good also, as it is two similar Hebrew letters teth and pe…
D.O. had a better suggestion above:
איך וועל זײַן באַפֿרײַט: I Shall Be Released.
There you go!
That is: DeepL can translate dictionaries.
Yeah; at least in this fragment it seems to have mastered the use/mention distinction. Maybe there were similar dictionary-like fragments in the learning corpus; I can’t see how it could have managed otherwise.
“Og snip-snap-snurre-basselurre!”
In English, Snip Snap Snorem/Snorum is primarily a card game. In French the game is Chnif Chnof Chnorum, probably < Schnipp Schnapp Schnorum.
The second line, much less well known, is “Hi Basalorum”, which shows up in other Germanic languages too and is (per WP) a corruption of apostelorum. In Swedish hi is replaced by hej, and there are five small villages in Westrobothnia named for the five words, apparently the result of a 19C surveyor out for a silly walk.
Molly Pruette
The canonical spelling of this surname appears to be Pruitt < western var. of Fr preux + -ette.
translating ethical dative is not going to be easy
The usual thing is to leave it out, which is historically what happened in ModE, as in Shakespeare’s “He plucked me ope his doublet” > “He plucked open his doublet”. Adding “for me” would mean that the plucking was done for my actual benefit.
The canonical spelling of this surname appears to be Pruitt
In Kentucky, Prewitt is more common.
Wholly unknown to me, but a card game called* schnapsen comes to mind.
* Well, no, the activity of playing the game is called that; it’s a verb.
ethical dative
“не надо мне тут сказки рассказывать!” – “not needed to-me here fairy-tales to-tell” (idiomatic)
“не надо мне тут отнекиваться” – “not needed to-me here to-nope-off-self” (in the text), where
*to-nope-off-self is constructed from “to fend off” and a root “nope” in the meaning “to say ‘not'”.
Since DeepL doesn’t do Asia, a couple of recommendations: https://papago.naver.com/ for Korean, definitely more natural and idiomatic than GT, fewer of the sort of howlers that even someone with only a passive and passing acquaintance notices. Ditto https://fanyi.baidu.com/ for MSM.
A disclaimer: In neither case am I qualified to speak to the overall accuracy, although I have noted several instances where I did know what the English should have been and both came closer than GT. That aside, the fluidity and naturalness of their English output is definitely more readable, and the one area of Naver’s service that I can comment on is its handling of pronouns – consistently being more consistent than GT and getting it right more often.
Thanks!
You can have ethical datives even if you don’t have a dative; in Kusaal
Fʋ yidim an wɛla? “Your family is how?”
Alaafʋ bɛɛ ba. “Heath exists them.”
An excellent GT version of the first paragraph of the Finnish WP entry for Jakob Gadolin (whose son had a chemical element named for him).
Original:
GT:
DeepL:
I still don’t know where the surname comes from.
@Y
Henricus Nicolai Gadolenus var troligen äldre bror till Sveno Nicolai Gadolenus som var skolmästare i Nyköping och Skara. De kom troligen från Gaddö i Valbo socken.
This would seem to say the surname was probably based on the town of Gaddö, where the (probably) brothers probably came from.
https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Gadolenus
Reminded me the Mendeleev’s table (the colloquial way to refer to the periodic table in Russian is “Mendeleyev’s table” – just like Pascal triange is “Tartaglia triangle” in Italian and “Khayam triangle” in Persian) in my school.
Someone corrected Гадолиний to G
aondolinium.That was perplexing: Tolkien fans were usually teenagers (while such corrections are usually done by somewhat younger students) and people who are that far into elves would not do anything so crude. Only later I realizd that what they meant was gondon, “condom” (гондон штопаный! [you’re] darned condom!)
P.S. darned literally. The idea is that being a darned condom is worse than being a new one:)
GT: Gadolin father was the Great Hate Sweden escaped from the priest Jakob Gadolinius…
DeepL: Gadolini’s father was Jakob Gadolinius, a priest who had fled to Sweden during the Great Patriotic War…
DeepL successfully rearranged the word order of the Finnish participial phrase into an English subordinate clause, while GT just gave up. However, DeepL got the name of the war wrong. Wiktionary says isoviha, literally ‘great hatred/wrath’, was the Russian occupation of Finland (1714-21), called the Greater Wrath in English, in contrast with the Lesser Wrath (pikkuviha) of 1742-43.
However, DeepL got the name of the war wrong.
And left out muun muassa ‘inter alia’.
Vana lokomotiiv
Tõuseb valgeid pilvi –
vana lokomotiiv.
Varsti näeb neid vaid filmis.
Armas, tuttav motiiv.
Rongijuhil võidund tunked,
pabeross hõõgub suus.
Rinnataskust kui furunkel
vaatab punane roos.
https://www.laulud.ee/laul/vana_lokomotiiv-606.aspx
GT
Old locomotive
Rising white clouds –
old locomotive.
Soon you will only see us in the movie.
Lovely, familiar motif.
The driver in victory overalls,
the paper towel glows in your mouth.
Chest pocket like a furuncle
looks at a red rose.
DL
The old locomotive
Rising white clouds –
the old locomotive.
Soon you’ll only see them in the movies.
A lovely, familiar motif.
The train driver in his antifreeze tights,
paper in the mouth.
A breast pocket as a furuncle
A red rose stares.
The first four lines are OK, except for ‘see us’—it’s ‘them’, but the second half is no good at all.
victory /antifreeze -> greasy
pabeross -> cigarette
A red rose looks out of the breast pocket like a furuncle.
A red rose looks out of the breast pocket like a furuncle.
The machines are built with the assumption that a sentence won’t continue across a linebreak. If you give them those two lines without a break, they’ll do better:
GT: A red rose looks out of a breast pocket as a furuncle.
DeepL: A red rose peeps out of the breast pocket like a furuncle. (Sometimes. I got a lot of random variation with this sentence. This is the best result.)
Here’s one where DeepL does a funny mistranslation which Google avoids:
From Estonian Wikipedia:
DeepL:
Google:
läänemeresoome = ‘Balto-Finnic’; Läänemeri (Baltic Sea) is literally ‘Western Sea’, so that’s where DeepL got “west”, but “Germanic” is just a hallucination. (Conversely, the Baltic Sea is the ‘Eastern Sea’ in Germanic languages except English.)
Estonian cardinal directions previously on Language Hat.
“The major murder groups of the Estonian language” is truly inspired.
võidund
This didn’t help, either:
-nud (Estonian)
Alternative forms
-nd (informal)
Origin & history
From Proto-Finnic *-nut, cognate to Finnish -nut.
Suffix
-nud
1. Forms the past connegative form of a verb
Ma ei käinud eile poes.
I didn’t go to the store yesterday.
2. Forms the past active participle of a verb
Mees on õppinud.
The man has studied.
https://www.wordsense.eu/-nud/
murder groups
That was a touch of genius. It took murderühmad apart (murde + rühma ‘group’ +d ‘plural’) and then threw in an R just for good measure.
And murre is interesting in its own right.
murtaa
Finnish
Etymology
From Proto-Finnic *murtadak, from Proto-Uralic *mura-.
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈmurtɑːˣ/, [ˈmurt̪ɑː(ʔ)]
Rhymes: -urtɑː
Syllabification: mur‧taa
Verb
murtaa
1. (transitive) to break (to cause to end up in two or more pieces)
Aion murtaa naamiosi.
I am going to break your mask.
2. (transitive, medicine) Of a bone, to cause to crack under physical strain
Älä yritä murtaa hänen niskaansa.
Don’t try to break his neck.
Älä murra sormiasi koripallossa.
Don’t break your fingers playing basketball.
3. (transitive, tennis, ~ (syöttö)) to break
4. (transitive) to fragment (to break apart)
5. (transitive, ~ (tahto)) to break (to cause a person or animal to lose his/her/its will)
Norsun tahto on murrettava ennen kuin sitä voi käyttää kantojuhtana.
You have to break an elephant before you can use it as an animal of burden.
Amerikka on käyttänyt monia kidutustapoja murtaakseen sotavankinsa.
America has used many forms of torture to break their POWs.
murre
Estonian
Noun
murre (genitive murde, partitive murret)
1. dialect
Further reading
murre in Eesti keele seletav sõnaraamat
Finnish
Etymology 1
murtaa + -e
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈmurːeˣ/, [ˈmurːe̞(ʔ)]
Rhymes: -urːe
Syllabification: mur‧re
Noun
murre
1. dialect
Thus, just ‘broken speech’.
ESTONIAN YIDDISH AND ITS CONTACTS WITH COTERRITORIAL LANGUAGES
ANNA VERSCHIK
The dissertation consists of ten articles in three languages (English, Estonian
and Yiddish), the summary where the most important conclusions will be
presented, the list of informants and text samples. Two articles are dedicated to
the description of the dialect (Estonian Yiddish) in the NEY context. Two articles
focus on the contacts with the coterritorial languages (Estonian and Baltic
German). The rest of the articles deal with the dynamic of the sociolinguistic
situation (changes in the status of Yiddish in Estonia, language choice, general
character of Jewish multilingualism and its particular manifestations in Estonia
etc.).
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/79106855.pdf
murder groups
Something/someone must also have had fun:
указательное настроение, активный голос отрицательного несовершенного, указательное настроение, активный голос плюсовершинного, повелительное настроение, активный голос настоящего времени, кроме единственного второго лица, активный голос идеального,
https://hrwiki.ru/wiki/Estonian_grammar
socken
In case anyone, like me, has wondered about how the -o- is pronounced—/ʊ/ or /ɔ/, it’s the former, as can be heard here.
Seeing “murder groups” inspired me to look up the etymology of “murder (as in flock or group) of crows”. The OED says “Origin uncertain; probably the same word as murder n.1”.
The historical quotes show a very odd pattern: There are three from 1470s (1475, ?1478) — and then nothing for centuries! One of the 1475 spellings was “Mursher”. Did someone misread a “t” for a long “s”? Or miswrite/misprint long “s” for “t”? The other spellings are “morther” and “murther”.
In 1939, the citation reads “Birds… Terms which represent noises or cries… Crows, murder.” — which makes me wonder how it was meant to refer to a group of crows.
It isn’t until 1973 that “murder-as-a-group” is (again?) used in that form.
Something weird is going on.
That’s a good catch, Owlmirror. GB snippet view has found nothing for “murder of crows” between 1700 and 1940 (except for a 1930 reference for “a wholesale murder of crows”, literally—they were held responsible for eating half the pecan crop somewhere.)
Ivor Brown’s 1950 Having the Last Word writes, “To the terms of assembly there is no end. Hare quotes nany not hitherto known to me, he cites: a Trembling of Goldfishes, a Murder of Crows, an Unkindness of Ravens, a Rafter of Turkeys,…” That refers, I think, to C. E. Hare’s 1949 The Language of Field Sports (the OED’s first modern source). I’ll have to root the actual book out and see if there are any hints to its sources.
The English Dialect Dictionary doesn’t have anything I can find.
It’s interesting that in all these quotations, new and old, you only see that exact collocation. You don’t see phrases like “great murders of them landed on the pecan trees” or such.
It looks like Hare or some near predecessor collected these terms, and that the collections spread since then in the literature on English linguistic curiosities. To say that “murder is a term in the English language for a collection of crows” requires a peculiar stretch of the definition of “language”.
The entire system of such terms seems to have been largely invented out of whole cloth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Terms_of_venery
I think the OED’s explanation is sufficient: “One of many alleged group names found in late Middle English glossarial sources. Apparently revived in the 20th cent.” Google Books shows enough snippets from C.E. Hare’s book to confirm that it’s quoting the same Middle English glossaries that are cited in the OED entry.
It isn’t until 1973 that “murder-as-a-group” is (again?) used in that form. — You can’t know that from the OED entry. They don’t tell you how many *other* occurrences there were between the citations. (That’s on my wish list for some future edition!) In fact, there was a play called “A Murder of Crows” by Ted Willis in 1965.
I was minded to look up a couple more …
The OED has “exaltacion of larkes” once from 1430, then nothing until the 1800s.
There may be a dating error, although I’m not sure where — the source for “exaltacion” is: “c1430 J. Lydgate Horse, Goose & Sheep (1822) 30″. But that’s the same source as for “A murther of crowes”, except that it’s dated “?1478” in the entry for “murder”.
I note that “murder” of crows is a separate entry from “murder” as in “deliberate and unlawful killing”, while “exaltation of larks” is under the same entry as the main term.
And “clowder” for cats is stuck under the entry for “cludder”. Hm.
Wordwizard has a thread on collective nouns from 2007-2009, with some addenda from 2014.
My sense of it (having done no research whatever) is that there were a few such specialized words once used by an unknown quantity of hunters and known to no one else but dogged lexicographers, and then Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks came out in 1969 and for whatever reason became fantastically popular (like Joplin rags) and went through many reprintings (I still have a copy someone gave me in those days) and suddenly everyone knew about them and wanted as many examples as possible and started inventing them for all sorts of groups of things and people.
Sigh, yes, I was sloppy. I wishfully thought that they would have the earliest exact occurrence of the phrase, but they skipped the 1965 example, and also the 1950 one that Y posted, and perhaps others.
Perhaps invented, but in many cases anciently so. Finding obscure words set out and defined in an incunabulum from the 1480’s was perhaps so exciting for certain modern lexicographers they may have skipped over clues suggesting that many of the supposed lexical items were 15th-century jokes and would have been so understood at the time.
Perhaps invented, but in many cases anciently so.
No, I’m talking about create-your-own phrases like “a lollapalooza of lexicograpers” or whatever.
A hat-rack of linguistic commenters.
There you go.
A rain of cats and dogs.
An algebra of mathematicians, a plasma of physicists, a labporatory of chemists, a species of biologists, a bank of economists, an age of historians, a clan of sociologists…. there is an xkcd comics somwhere in this.
ok, I’m just saying that the 20th/21st-century joke inventions appear to be in a certain degree of continuity with 15th-century joke inventions (whether they realize it or not) …
BTW here is a string of words that is actually out there on the internet: “let’s not get bogged down in the details, as a babble of linguists might do.” I might prefer “babel of” myself.
the source for “exaltacion” is: “c1430 J. Lydgate Horse, Goose & Sheep (1822) 30″. But that’s the same source as for “A murther of crowes”, except that it’s dated “?1478” in the entry for “murder”.
The OED is plagued with bibliographic inconsistencies. In this case, “murder” is revised for the Third Edition and “exaltation” isn’t, so the ?1478 dating is more reliable. Possibly the list of collective nouns is found in Caxton’s printed version and can’t be found for certain in Lydgate’s original manuscript. Caxton might even have stuck in something from some other source, he wasn’t fussy.
They are working on restoring the original version of all quotes and standardizing the bibliographic information, but there are millions of quotations and dating of pre-modern sources is difficult, so it’s a slow process.
I love the name Wynkyn de Worde.
Indeed you do!
Nice to see I haven’t changed that much in eight years!
A convergence of orthoptists (I tried for years to make this happen, but, like “fetch”, it never did …)
Espèce de biologue !
@dm
Surely biologists are more diverse than a species and deserve at least a family. But species may be good, because you then can derive a subspecies of microbiologists and an atomic species of biophysicists (or biochemists?).
a plasma of physicists
And an ectoplasm of mediums.
A haberdashery of hattologues.
(Some hattologues speak wearing many hats; some speak through their hats; some do both at different times and you have to put on your thinking cap to figure out which).
Per the OED, “haberdashery” derives from “haberdasher”, which is obscure.
haberdash:
Ididnotknowthat: “Haberdasher” was a 19th-C slang term for a drink-seller, possibly because “tape” was an 18th/19th-C slang term for “spirituous liquor”. (Speculatively: maybe because at that time liquor bottles first began to be sealed with tape to emphasize that no tampering with the contents had occurred?)
@DO, DM, PP: An unranked taxon of biologists.
(Subgroupings TBD by appropriate working groups.)
Juha: I’d pick a rapping of mediums.
Owlmirror, how did you manage to use the <small> tag? When I try, it’s automatically removed.
I did it with my godlike powers. (Owlmirror had used square brackets to show the desired outcome, so I Made It Happen.)
By the way, I recently saw an early Ingrid Bergman movie made in Sweden and was deeply satisfied to see the “SLUT” at the end.
This being the most recent thread on machine translation—
I looked up this page, on the fauna of the island of Sylt, in the NW corner of Germany. Apple’s Safari browser graciously offered to translate it from German to English.
The heading Seehunde und Kegelrobben is very uncreatively translated as “Seals and Seals” (GT has “Harbor seals and gray seals”). Things pick up on the next heading, “Pork Whales” (Schweinswale, porpoises) and reach their zenith in the bird section, with “Bass boobies and star divers, saber snebes and oyster fishermen – all bird species that romp around on Sylt…” — that is, Basstölpel und Sterntaucher, Säbelschnäbler und Austernfischer, which GT, reasonably again, renders as “Gannets and red-throated divers, avocets and oystercatchers”.
It’s all worth it for the saber snebe.
From Slut to Sylt!
The town of List is at the northern end of Sylt, too.
There is no English word snebe. It sure does look like the translating algorithm tried to create a plausible cognate to Schnabel.
That’s actually a little scary. Soon the algorithm will be creating proto-languages and adding to the Nostratic theory.
I wondered if snebe was Danish for “snipe”, but Wikipedia implies sneppe.
On the third hand, sneppe is suspiciously similar to G Schnepfe and suspiciously dissimilar to Faroese snípa, so perhaps snebe is a native Danish word after all?
I am puzzled that it couldn’t find snout. Or maybe the algorithm somehow knows that snout is not used to mean “beak” for birds?
Neither is Schnauze…
oyster fishermen
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meriharakka
meriharakka
Finnish
Etymology
meri (“sea”) + harakka (“magpie”)
Noun
meriharakka
1. Eurasian oystercatcher, Haematopus ostralegus
2. oystercatcher (bird of the family Haematopodidae)
3. (in the plural) The taxonomic family Haematopodidae, or, the genus Haematopus, the only genus in the family.
DeepL variants: amberjack, sea heron, sea harrier
Strandskade in Danish. “Beach magpie” so same idea as in Finnish, just look at the pictures innit.
@DM. For sneppe look to MLG as usual. (sneppe for Schnepfe). Danish does have a verb snebre which is what ducks do when feeding on duckweed (andemad) though that is usually snadre, and the characteristic sound making of storks though that is usually knebre; all three also pejorative of idle talk. The etymology of snebre goes no further than “compare German dialect sneppern” but if you want snebe for “bill” it’s probably your best bet.
Interesting. Schnattern is only for the sounds ducks make and for rapid-fire idle talk; the filter-feeding behavior (“dabbling” is the technical term in English) doesn’t seem to have a name at all.
I thought I’d told before that the Norwegian name for the oyster catcher is tjeld, but Google’s not my friend today. Anyway, the word is homonymous, and possibly identical, with tjeld “tent, pavillion, wallcover” (archaic). The latter is a metonymic extension from “pole”, says Bjorvand & Lindeman, so the bird might have been named for its long beak.
“Beach magpie”
Turns out English also has one:
sea-pie
English
Noun
sea-pie (plural sea-pies)
1. The oystercatcher.
2. A pie made of meat and vegetables baked in a pan over the fire, with a pastry crust, or in layers between crusts, the number of which denominate it a two or three decker.
sea pie
English
Etymology 1
sea + pie (“a type of pastry”)
Noun
sea pie (plural sea pies)
1. A dish of crust or pastry with meat or fish, etc., cooked together in alternate layers, once a common food of sailors.
Etymology 2
sea + pie (“magpie”)
Alternative forms
sea pye
Noun
sea pie (plural sea pies)
1. (archaic) oystercatcher (any of several black or pied coastal wading birds in the genus Haematopus that have a long red or orange bill and feed on shellfish)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-pie
In Russian, it’s кулик-сорока ‘magpie wader’. It seems magpie features as part of the circum-Baltic names of the bird:
Latvian: jūras žagatas
Lithuanian: jūrinės šarkos
Swedish: strandskata
Japanese, for some reason, calls it
都鳥 (ja) (みやこどり, miyakodori), ミヤコドリ (ja) (miyakodori)
‘capital bird (c. as in ‘London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, etc)’
the Norwegian name for the oyster catcher is tjeld
tjaldr
Old Norse
From Proto-Indo-European *del-, *dul- (“to shake, hesitate”), see also Dutch touteren (“to tremble”), North Frisian talt, tolt (“unstable, shaky”).[1] Related to English tilt.
Noun
tjaldr m (genitive tjalds, plural tjaldar)
1. oystercatcher (Haematopus ostralegus)
Descendants
Danish: tjeld c
Faroese: tjaldur n
→ Danish: tjald c (“weed”)
Icelandic: tjaldur m
Norn: shalder m (Shetland), chalder, chaldro (Orkney)
Scots: chalder
Norwegian: tjeld m
Also Catalan:
garsa de mar
Catalan
Etymology
Literally, “sea magpie”.
Noun
garsa de mar f (plural garses de mar)
1. oystercatcher (bird of the genus Haematopus)
In Estonian, it’s merisk/meriski
Catalan garsa ‘magpie’ is, as far as I can tell, not at all related to Spanish garza ‘heron’. The former must be a Germanic loan (Frankish *agattjā, OHG agaza ‘magpie’, cf. French agace), but the r is odd. Perhaps it arose under the influence of some cognate to garza, itself probably a Celtic loanword.
All this comes from Wiktionary. Having written this, I see that Corominas has two pages on garza, and he thinks it’s related to garsa. I’ll need to read what he says.
“Beach magpie” so same idea as in Finnish, just look at the pictures innit.
Well, it works OK for the pied species but fails utterly for the concolorous ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oystercatcher#Species
matasovic has for P-C “*korxsa ‘heron, crane’ [Noun] “.
The modern Irish is corr + another noun, usually iasc. The g in Spanish looks OK, compare gato.
The etymology of Zelt “tent” is unclear, and the supposed earlier meaning “pole” is called “not attested”.
@juha, the pied one is the only one in Europe, according to that list. So how would Danish and Finnish and Catalan know better?
ODS in 1948 knows Tjald only as the oystercatcher, with ancestors back to ON. tjald for weed is “known since the 70’s” but “origin unknown” according to a more updated dictionary (which doesn’t have the bird word).
Norsk Ordbok 2014 also has the form skjortjeld “magpie tjeld“, adding “as discerned from gråtjeld, kviketjeld“. The latter is a name (new to me) for the redshank (Tringa totanus), a red-beaked and red-footed species of sandpiper.
–
The meaning “post” is not attested, but the etymological derivation from *tel- “cut, hew” seems sound.
The bird is masculine (ON tjaldr) while the tent is neuter (ON tjald), so at the very least there’s a derivation involved. I have speculated that the connectiing meaning of tjaldr might be “digging bar (pointed pole used for making holes in the ground)”, descriptive of how the beak is rammed vertically into the seabed. But now it strikes me that the main use for a digging bar is for making postholes, so the derivation might be tjald n. “(post for) tent” -> tjaldr m. “bar for making posholes”..
A third possibly connected word is German Zelter “pacer, ambler”, attested in ON as the horsename Tjaldari. A semantic parallel is Norw. stolpre, Ger. stolpern v. “walk stiffly and unsteadily” ~ Norw. stolpe m. pole, post. So maybe it’s not about the long straight beak but the way it walks.
(Stolpern is “stumble”, “trip [over something]”.)
Right. But “stumble” is easily developed from “walk unsteadily”.