Re:The language you speak changes your perception of time
by petemir on Saturday March 16, 2024 @08:17PM
(#39730662)
Unrelated to semantics, but whenever I hear people talking and my Spanish alarm goes off (I’m a native Spanish speaker), but I realize I don’t understand the words, it’s Greek most of the time.
Italian and Spanish also share lots of idioms, too.
Re:The language you speak changes your perception of time
by stavros on Sunday March 17, 2024 @04:11AM
(#39732783)
Yes, the accents are almost identical, to the point where I sound native when I speak Spanish. I also had a Spanish friend pronounce Greek words, and he was spot on.
Re:The language you speak changes your perception of time
by stavros on Saturday March 16, 2024 @07:43PM
(#39730460)
By the way, a Greek "full day" isn't the same as the English "long day". "Long day" implies tiredness, whereas "full day" doesn't have a positive or a negative connection. It's simply a day in which lots of things happened.
Re:The language you speak changes your perception of time
by samatman on Saturday March 16, 2024 @11:43PM
(#39731761)
We have an expression in English for a day in which lots of things happened as well! We call it a "full day".
Re:The language you speak changes your perception of time
by stavros on Sunday March 17, 2024 @04:12AM
(#39732786)
Yep, exactly, I don't know what the article is on about.
Re:The language you speak changes your perception of time
by arachnid92 on Sunday March 17, 2024 @12:37AM
(#39731967)
It's the same in Spanish. As a native Spanish speaker (and a Swedish speaker too!), this really annoyed me about the first two paragraphs of the article. The authors clearly didn't speak the languages they were commenting on, as the expressions they compared are not analogous to each other!
Re:The language you speak changes your perception of time
by mlinhares on Saturday March 16, 2024 @10:08PM
(#39731318)
Spanish is derived from Latin that was heavily influenced by Greek and a lot of what was "good literature" was written in Greek (like the bible) so as these works were translated into Latin and Spanish they would re-create the idioms there.
I've noticed that a surprising amount of idioms are the same between Spanish and Greek, to the point where I will translate a Greek idiom to Spanish and it will usually be intelligible to a Spanish speaker.
The same doesn't happen with English, where most things are different.