Without the “on you”, but I’ve heard translators use the expression “have [a language]” a lot. If someone claims to have a language, the next question is to what degree: can you get the gist, translate from it, translate into it?
After having written “in Spanish” rather than my customary “in Spain” in the previous post, I remembered having heard aguas frescas with the meaning of “cold water and juice” in Monterrey. Me bad.
Also, I’m sure that some Spanish speakers learning English mistakenly say “Do you dominate [whatever language]?” – Spanish ‘dominar’ can mean “speak fluently” (a meaning somewhat similar to, but more broadly used than, the English verb ‘to master’.)
Slight hijack (since not related to inter-lingual mixups) but in slightly outdated Hebrew, one might ask “do you *hear *(language)?” – meaning “do you understand (language)?” *
To which my answer would usually be – “I can **hear **it just fine; but I don’t understand a thing!”
I was a student in the 90s, and it was a big deal if your shitty student flat had a landline of its own, rather than a shared payphone in the hall.
There might still be people who say ‘Have you any Gaelic on you?’ but I’d expect them to be older and from an Irish-speaking background, with English as a second language. That construction is a direct translation of the Irish structure: ‘An bhfuil Gaeilge ort?’ or ‘Is there Irish on you?’ The same construction is used for hunger - there’s no such word as ‘hungry’; instead of saying ‘I am hungry’ you say ‘Tá ocras orm,’ or ‘There’s a hunger on me’ - and for fear and a bunch of other stuff.
ETA: Also, no one Irish calls the language ‘Gaelic’. We call it Irish.
Sorry for the double post, but the German ‘Handy’ thing reminded me of another Italian one: the word for jogging is, for some unfathomable reason, ‘footing’. Pronounced to rhyme with ‘hooting’. An English-speaker could easily assume that meant walking, say.
I truly don’t get this one. Why borrow a word from another language and, instead of borrowing the actual word, just shoehorn in a semi-relevant one?
eclectic wench, plenty of native speakers from Donegal and its islands call it Gaelic even in English but yeah you’re generally right about it being referred to as Irish.
I used to get tripped up by “I’m after having my dinner”. I thought they meant they were looking for a restaurant when they meant they had just had their dinner. I never learned Irish, but I think this is another construction that comes from Irish.
True. Funnily here in the Veneto you get “baccalà mantecato”, which is dried cod whipped with butter (and maybe some cream) - so the dialect word is more Spanish. It’s delicious.
But it’s not borrowed, it’s invented following the patterns of a fashionable foreign language to sound cooler, a fake Anglicism. It’s called footing in Spain and France too, don’t ask me where was it used first.
Baccalà mantecato does sound guiltily delicious. And hey, fish is good for you, right?
And in German “die” means “the,” doesn’t it? That’s a pretty false friend there!
**
“I was so pissed, I started sucking on a fag… even though I’d given them up for lent.”**
How does it work to use both senses of “fags” in canada?
Do you spend a lot of time pantomiming smoking a cigarette so no one gets the wrong idea? (And frantically pantomiming as the eyebrows are going up and you realize they think you’re pantomiming a blowjob…)
Um, separation/partition is “mechitza”.
Fahrt means trip or travel. A vehicle is Fahrzeug.
You’re right - I messed up. “Fahrt” turns up in compound words, like “Ausfahrt” (exit), “Bahnfahrt” (train journey), and somehow I got the idea that it also turned up in compound words describing vehicles.
One British English phrasing that seems unusual to Americans (at least to me), is “Way Out” for “Exit.”
British exits are really amazing, man!
It made perfect sense to see a “Way Out” sign in the last episode of “The Prisoner.”
Only in writing, though. The German article “die” is pronounced “dee”.
About Brit “quite.” (Above, but no pull cites.)
Which was answered by “indeed.”
Which, I, feeling witty also, answered with “what?”
No one picked me up on that, so this time I’ll put this consummately Brit language thing in all its glory. It is as foreign to me as the Queen:
“Interesting thread, what what?”
Does anybody still say this? I’ve seen it only in PG Wodehouse, who is both a writer who doesn’t hold back satire, and many of whose stories are set in the early 1930s. And maybe some Monty Python.
Hmmm…but this sounds more like navigational jargon.
In everyday usage I can’t think of a context where it doesn’t mean “true”, or “real” or “not false”. The “actual news of the day”, if anyone actually–Hah! A little joke.–said it, could only mean the genuine or true news in contrast to news stories that were fabricated or embellished.
No, I never heard anyone say it in real life, except as a joke. Not only is it very dated, it also seems to have been an exclusively upper class thing. It isn’t a Wodehouse invention though, Dorothy L. Sayers’ aristocratic detective character, Lord Peter Wimsey says it too. Wimsey, however, belongs to roughly the same period and social class as Bertie Wooster (Wimsey is an actual lord, Bertie is nephew to one).