view the rest of the comments
Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics.
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
In most languages, "get well soon" is expressed as good wishes. In Russian, they use the imperative form, so it is like an order or a command. It's буд здоров(а), which is literally "be healthy" as a command. They also use it as "bless you" after sneezing. (For those whoe can't read Cyrillic, in Latin it's approximately said like "bud zdarov(a)". The -a suffix is the female version, without it is male.)
In French, the expression "du coup" (it means something like "therefore" or "so" or "thus") can be used in place of like 10 other expressions.
Is all being replaced by "du coup".
In German, capitalisation matters. In contrast with many other languages, nouns must be capitalised, or it changes the meaning. For example:
Notice how only the capitalisation changed. The first sentence means "help the poor to fuck" while the second sentence means "help those poor birds".
I didn't know that about German and capitalization. That's fascinating! How would that play out verbally? Would you just have to figure it out from context?
Yes, from context
I took German classes in high school and have been struggling ever since not to automatically capitalize nouns when I write in English. It's been like 25 years.
"Get well soon" is imperative!
But "consequently" and "so" and "in conclusion" can all be replaced by "therefore" in English as well as in French ... if one accepts a lack of nuance and depth.
There are subtle differences in all of them, and for instance switching "suddenly" for "if I understand well" would often confuse the listener.