# What verbs are used in other languages for 'playing' music? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 20, 2009, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422 "2009-10-20T01:25:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2009, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/41 "2009-10-20T21:31:36Z")
> [@NoCoolUserName](#): > > Someone help with Chinese, please? I’ve been trying to find this forever. I think it’d depend on the particular act/instrument. You’d broadcast (放) the radio, record, MP3, etc.. Strum or maybe finger (弹) the piano and stringed instruments. Blow (吹) the woodwinds. Hit (打) percussion. If you just generally play music (like as a living or hobby) regardless of instrument, you’d probably rephrase it as “I’m a musician”. Some MIGHT say they “play” (玩) music, but they’d mean it in the literal (or perhaps silly/cute) sense, as in music is so enjoyable to them that they do it as a game. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2009, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/42 "2009-10-21T04:10:51Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > While at the same time, _Lesachek_, the Hebrew word for “play”, also means “act” - much as it once did in English. Yep, but he asked about music. My other point still stands–“Play” in English has more meanings than “Lesachek”. So, I guess I’m not the only Israeli here, eh? ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2009, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/43 "2009-10-21T07:57:26Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > Yep, but he asked about music. > > My other point still stands–“Play” in English has more meanings than “Lesachek”. > > So, I guess I’m not the only Israeli here, eh? Sorry, didn’t mean to make it sound like criticism. It was just a _he’arat agav_. And yeah -\*\* Noone Special \*\*and I are the board’s two “veteran” Israelis. There are also a few newer guys, as well as a handful of “honorary Israelis” (like **Kyla** ). ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2009, 9:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/44 "2009-10-21T09:49:04Z")
> [@Shot\_From\_Guns](#): > > Psh, Japanese makes plenty of sense! How many other languages do you know that have only \*\*two \*\*irregular verbs? Actually, Adamawa Fulfulde (spoken in Northern Cameroon) has exactly two irregular verbs. “Andugo” (to know) can only be conjugated in the positive and negative present tense and “Wallah/Don” (has/exists and do not have/do not exist) which is not conjugated at all (although “Don” has plenty of other grammatical uses.) All other verbs have positive and negative conjugations for the past, present continuous and future. ---
**Author:** ![robardin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/43a26b/32.png) [@robardin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robardin)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2009, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/45 "2009-10-21T20:25:11Z")
> [@NoCoolUserName](#): > > Someone help with Chinese, please? I’ve been trying to find this forever. AFAIK (as a native Mandarin speaker born and raised in the US), there is no single verb to just “play music” unless you mean to play back _recorded_ music, in which case it’s the same word for “put”. As with Japanese, the verbs to play specific instruments relate to the physical act of making the instrument go: one would blow on a flute, strike on drums, etc. There is also a specific verb for singing. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/46 "2009-10-22T03:35:13Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Sorry, didn’t mean to make it sound like criticism. It was just a _he’arat agav_. > > And yeah -\*\* Noone Special \*\*and I are the board’s two “veteran” Israelis. There are also a few newer guys, as well as a handful of “honorary Israelis” (like **Kyla** ). Alright, no problem. I wasn’t offended. Honorary Israelis, eh? Good idea. I know someone who keeps on begging me to teach her to be Israeli… You just gave me an idea. _Toda!_ ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [October 22, 2009, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/47 "2009-10-22T15:18:04Z")
[QUOTE=Babale;11690423Honorary Israelis, eh? Good idea. I know someone who keeps on begging me to teach her to be Israeli… You just gave me an idea. _Toda!_[/QUOTE] Heh, I think my honorarium may have expired, it’s been such a long time. But I did my junior year in undergrad in Israel and am pretty familiar with the place. My Hebrew is now beyond rusty. I only just learned that Russian uses the same verb for playing a game and playing an instrument and even though it’s the same in English, it sounds WRONG to me. Bulgarian has that split up and I find it dizzying when Bulgarian and Russian diverge grammatically. (They run on parallel a lot of the time.) The word for play in Russian is nearly the same as it is in Bulgarian (Russian “I play”: играю/igrayu, Bulgarian “I play”: играя/igraya) but if you play an instrument in Bulgarian, you say “свиря/svirya” (I play). I’m not sure what the grammatical root is, it doesn’t mean “touch” or anything like that. AFAIK, it just means “play [an instrument]”. It could be from Turkish? I’d be interested to know if that dichotomy exists in other Slavic languages. ---
**Author:** ![Gala\_Matrix\_Fire](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4da419/32.png) [@Gala\_Matrix\_Fire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gala_Matrix_Fire)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2009, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/48 "2009-10-24T16:56:44Z")
In Arabic, عزف. While I wouldn´t say it equals “to work music,” I’d say that it equals “to make music,” and interesting, “to work” and “to make” can be expressed with the same word in Arabic. Not that that means anything, just that the fact that “play” means more than one thing in English is no reflection on the practice of making musical sounds. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2009, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/49 "2009-10-24T17:36:29Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > Portuguese… > Children playing: _brincar_—_Vai brincar com seu irmão_ (Go play with your brother.) That’s funny. I assume the main meaning of ths verb, as in Spanish, is to “jump”. Extending this to all children’s playing is neat – they sure do a lot of jumping! Old English managed to do just about everything mentioned in this thread, and more, with one verb: “lacan”, meaning “move quickly, jump, play (a musical instrument), fight”. This is from a Gothic root “laikan”, meaning “hop” or “jump” (root also of Danish “lege” and Swedish “leka”, with the same meaning). In Middle High German, it came to mean “hop” or “deceive”! The root is cognate to Greek “elelizo” and Sanskrit “rej-”, both meaning “to make tremble”. (I get this from a wonderful old book, Carl Darling Buck’s _A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages_, which is unusual in that it groups words by their general meaning, not by cognates/common root words.) ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2009, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/50 "2009-10-24T17:47:34Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > Old English managed to do just about everything mentioned in this thread, and more, with one verb: “lacan”, meaning “move quickly, jump, play (a musical instrument), fight”. Surviving in dialect as “to lake” and possibly as “to lark about.” OED hedges a bit because of that -r-: [QUOTE=OED] Possibly it may represent the northern LAKE v., as heard by sporting men from Yorkshire jockeys or grooms; the sound (lɛək, læək), which is written lairk in Robinson’s Whitby Glossary and in dialect books, would to a southern hearer more naturally suggest ‘lark’ than ‘lake’ as its equivalent in educated pronunciation. On the other hand, it is quite as likely that the word may have originated in some allusion to [the bird “lark”]. [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![KarlGrenze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dbc845/32.png) [@KarlGrenze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGrenze)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2009, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/51 "2009-10-24T17:56:18Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > That’s funny. I assume the main meaning of ths verb, as in Spanish, is to “jump”. Extending this to all children’s playing is neat – they sure do a lot of jumping! No, the main meaning REALLY is “to play” (or “to have fun”), not “to jump”. It is one of those verbs that is written the same, conjugated almost the same, yet has a different meaning in those two languages. Online source: [Online Portuguese dictionary.](http://www.priberam.pt/DLPO/default.aspx?pal=brincar) My Brazilian friends look at me funny for a couple of seconds before realizing what I mean when I make the mistake of using brincar to mean “I jump”. But you’re right, using that last sentence helps me remember the meaning of brincar in Portuguese. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2009, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/52 "2009-10-24T20:39:43Z")
> [@KarlGrenze](#): > > No, the main meaning REALLY is “to play” (or “to have fun”), not “to jump”. It is one of those verbs that is written the same, conjugated almost the same, yet has a different meaning in those two languages. Online source: [Online Portuguese dictionary.](http://www.priberam.pt/DLPO/default.aspx?pal=brincar) > > My Brazilian friends look at me funny for a couple of seconds before realizing what I mean when I make the mistake of using brincar to mean “I jump”. > > But you’re right, using that last sentence helps me remember the meaning of brincar in Portuguese. 🙂 Cool! Could it have once also meant “jump” in Portuguese, but has now lost that part of its meaning? (To have its semantic field replaced with, I would guess, some cognate of the Spanish “saltar”?) ---
**Author:** ![KarlGrenze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dbc845/32.png) [@KarlGrenze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGrenze)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2009, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/53 "2009-10-25T01:25:52Z")
I don’t know that far back in the history of Portuguese. Although the same site I gave above has “brincar” as the last definition in the entry for “saltar”. My Spanish-Portuguese text dictionary, though, does not put either of them together, and states that brincar is jugar (“to play”), while saltar is saltar (“to jump”) in both languages. ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2009, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422/54 "2009-10-26T16:19:45Z")
There are plenty of false friends (or at least confusing friends) between Spanish and Portuguese. In Spanish, one says _olvidar-se_ (to forget); Portuguese has _olvidar_, but you won’t hear anyone say it outside of literature. They normally say _esquescer_. I just learned from **Colibri** that his name means “hummingbird” in Spanish. Much to my surprise it has the same meaning in Portuguese, though _beija-flor_ is what a Brazilian would say. It’s pretty funny for a Brazilian to hear someone talking about their hair in Spanish, _pelo_, because that word means “fur” in Portuguese; the proper word would be _cabelo_. “My, your fur looks nice today!” 🙂 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-verbs-are-used-in-other-languages-for-playing-music/514422.md?page=2)