And, of course, ‘estou morto’. Interesting example.
My husband has 25 cousins proper and a boatload of 2nd cousins and other kinds of cousins and nobody in the family bothers to keep it all straight. But of course my son calls all of our cousins Uncle and Aunt so-and-so because they are about the same age as us. And my husband’s cousins’ children are referred to as my son’s cousins without any specificity. It’s kind of a mess. (Especially when they marry each other, which did happen in earlier generations.)
I agree. Cousin is shorthand for any distant relative whose exact relationship is too complicated to bother explaining.
It means more than just first cousin , as you can have second cousins , third cousins and removed cousins ( my first cousin’s child to me is my first cousin once-removed) but in English , you wouldn’t call an aunt/uncle or niece/nephew a cousin even if they are your age.
Right. It’s been almost 30 years since I could speak Portuguese with any fluency at all, and couldn’t remember the vocabulary.
Why on earth would you feel the need to identify yourself as “OP”?
The understanding is that “alive” or “dead” are considered states of the subject, so it takes “estar”. There can be such a thing as a permanent “state”.
But yes, you have things like:
“Soy abogado y estoy con Gil, Navarro, Avilés, Rodríguez & Albino” – “I am [substance] a lawyer and I am [state] with Gil, Navarro, Avilés, Rodríguez & Albino”
“Soy estudiante, estoy en tercer año en Derecho de la UPR” – “I am a student and am in Year 3 at UPR Law”
In both the second part is easy, obviously your job or partnership with the firm, or the class you are in, is a state. The condition of being a lawyer, or a law student… or the mayor, though, is seen as something substantive to how you are to be identified as to where you fit in the world. So it takes “ser”.
Occupations, ranks, titles, etc. the person is invested with, take “ser” even if they are temporal. Conditions, states or locations take “estar” even if they are permanent. Generally, because there’s no language w/o exceptions.
Another Hebrew word with no real English equivalent - תתחדש - “titchadesh/i” (literally: “May you be renewed”). It’s what you say to someone to congratulate them for getting something new. “Are those new shoes? Titchadesh!”
The Afrikaans equivalent is gesellig.
In fact, Wiktionary’s example sentence, " Ons het gesellig om 'n vuur gekuier." literally means “We had a cosy visit round the fire”
I would argue that the English word convivial can carry the same connotation (when it doesn’t mean a more extravagant party-type thing)
Yeah, I get that. When one learns Spanish, it’s sometimes pointed out that estar indicates a temporary or changeable state, while ser may indicate permanence. That’s not really the case, of course.
While both of those facts are, in principle, transitory, being a lawyer is certainly more permanent than being with a particular firm. Would I be right in guessing that the same person, in some other context (in comparison with some trait that’s even more fundamental or permanent) might say “estoy abogado”? Or that they might say “soy con Gil, Navarro, Avilés, Rodríguez & Albino”, in comparison to some more transitory trait (say, being the lawyer assigned to some particular case)?
For a long time, many cultures, but not US/English, had a word to describe the urge to destroy something adorable.
A researcher did finally come up with a term for it. “Cute aggression.”
I’ve never experienced this. I learned about it on Reply All.
(Okay, maybe I occasionally want to nibble my baby. I wouldn’t really put it that way though. More like, “I must hold and kiss you! Nom nom nom!”) But the stuff in the Reply All episode is more like, “That Pomeranian is so adorable I want to dropkick it over that fence!”
Does “gekuier” mean chit-chat or just talk, respectively? Because in my local variant of Plattdeutsch (Low German) which is related to Dutch which of course is related to Afrikaans, it means just that. The verb is “kuiern”.
ETA: the word gesellig exists in High German too, but has the slightly different meaning “sociable”.
Nope.
Interesting report. But I noticed that this specific term doesn’t appear in the linked research article, it seems to be the Forbes journalist, or from somewhere else. It strikes me as an odd name for the concept - it sounds more like the behavior of an aggressive puppy than our feelings toward a puppy. Something like “cuteness aggression” would make more sense.
At least in my part of Spanish-speaking culture those just like that, by themselves would not be used and would sound like a foreign language learner trying hard.
You could however, say “soy socio menor en Gil, Navarro, Avilés, Rodríguez & Albino” – “I am a junior partner in GNAR&A” because there you assert something that is an identifier of your person’s relationship to the firm.
But you could say either “estoy de abogado del demandante” or “soy abogado del demandante”, “I am [working–implied] as the plaintiff’s lawyer” vs. “I am the plaintiff’s lawyer”, though the first one makes it sound like that may not be so for the whole case. It’s things like that, subtleties about how the different components of the sentence relate to each other, that sometimes are aggravating for foreign learners of ser vs. estar.
And as always with every language, native speakers just “nurse it at the breast” so to speak and just “get it” never really needing to sit and break it down unless they go on to graduate studies in language.
Korinthe translates to currant, not raisin. 
Don’t be a Korinthenkacker 
! Dried grapes, raisins, currants, they’re all the same to me. (really, I’ve never understood the difference between raisins and currants)
ETA: I just learned on wiki that currant in the US can also mean what is called “Johannisbeere” in German, a whole other fruit. Now I’m confused, because I also get “Korinthe” as translation for currant, and a “Korinthe” in German is a kind of dried grape, like a raisin.
“Cousin”, by itself, means the child of one of your parent’s siblings. Adding a modifier to it changes the meaning. This is quite a common phenomenon with adjectives: A dead person is not a person, a vegan steak is not a steak, Chinese checkers is not a kind of checkers, etc.
Ah, thanks for the correction, then. Well, it seemed like a good guess.
I think that the English word “currant” is used for two different fruits, one of them a kind of (or very closely related to) a grape.
Maybe- I’ve never heard someone refer to their X cousin Y times removed unless they were specifically explaining the relationship. When someone says 'I’m going to my cousin’s kids wedding", it might be their first cousin’s kid or the child of their second cousin once removed. The only thing I might assume is that the cousin is at least around the speaker’s age ( because if the kid was around the speaker’s age, they would have said “my cousin’s wedding”). But many of the people I know are in at least occasional contact as far out as second cousin twice removed and that could make a difference.