ROMANIAN help for AmE speaker: some vocabulary translations, plus a breakdown of "negru ca abanosul

[runa27]

So, I'm going to be teaching myself Romanian in the future, because a.) it's a beautiful and intriguing language with a rich and interesting history and b.) I have a story set in Romania using (naturally) some Romanian characters and it's nowhere near close enough to the Spanish I've studied previously for me to "get by" in some of my resources

Comments

[runa27]

I was wondering if that was the case, too. I didn't know about abonos, but it makes intuitive sense (fairly close to ebony, plus knowing negru means black...). Also, the EUdict reference specifically uses jet-black and ebony (-colored), making me wonder now if it's literally black as ebony.

I wonder if the reason I wasn't able to find abanosul, is that it is one of those words that is conjugated? (Er, can you "conjugate" something that isn't a verb? Ugh, I need to brush up on my grammatical terms). Hmm...

Actually, that may well be the case! Granted, this is a user-generated dictionary, so I'm taking everything with a grain of salt until I hear from somebody fluent. But it looks like abanos refers to the ebony wood/tree. It also looks like lemn may also refer to more generic wood, given some of the other results when I click on the "abanos (lemn.)" reference, so that would mean that indeed abanos literally translates as ebony?

Wonder if this means Abanosescu would be a good derived surname? Which would be neat, as it's close to

[muckefuck]

The Southeast Asian spectre you're thinking of is the Malay penanggalan. There's a similar creature in Filipino folklore, the manananggal, but she doesn't soak her organs in vinegar. (The root of both names is a verb tanggal "separate".)

[runa27]

Thank you. :) Both for the clarification and the root (because that is neat).

[runa27]

I'm trying to think of what word you were thinking of originally... it's been a while since I studied Japanese.

Google provides only 諸井 . Was that the one you were thinking of? If so, I can see why it couldn't be pluralized, as given this reference, sounds like it's an adjective.

In fact... is that an "i adjective" per chance? If so, I can DEFINITELY see how it can't "be pluralized that way"!

Fun fact: according to EUdict, moroi is also Romanian for hedgehog, in addition to its folklore meaning. lolwut?

Either someone is having real fun with a user-generated dictionary, or I officially MUST learn Romanian. Where else on Earth are you going to find a language where you can make a vampire pun from the word for "hedgehog"?

[muckefuck]

諸井 is a surname. The usual spelling of the word you linked to is 脆い.

And it can't be pluralised that way because Japanese verbs don't conjugate to show number. (Despite its translation, moroi is a verb in Japanese; strictly speaking, Japanese has no adjectives, only verbal phrases or noun phrases which act as modifiers.) I'm not familiar with the full range of Japanese verb conjugations, but I've never come across one which would turn moroi into *moroii.

[runa27]

Well, yes, I mean... with the exception of the -tachi honorific for groups, there really isn't much pluralization in Japanese, period, except from context. I do remember enough of it to remember that ;) And yes, the word I was thinking of (incorrect assumption of pluralization and all) was the Romanian one, not Japanese.

So, just to clarify, the Japanese moroi you are referring to is not one of these, but a proper verb? Um, what does it mean then? Because even Googling that for translation gives me the same damn adjective all over again - with the meaning allegedly being "brittle", definitely an adjective - not a verb.

Ugh, I can't really remember my conjugations terribly well, but moroi doesn't look like a Japanese verb to me; then again, I only got three semesters in (due to availability of courses), so I didn't go terribly far past "generic polite" speech (i.e. verb forms that usually end in masu, and the conjugations thereof). And given how long it's been, it would take a while to get up to even recalling that much in

[muckefuck]

As I said above, Japanese doesn't have adjectives. Don't mistake grammatical facts about a translation of a word into another language for facts about the word itself. I would translate me in "Give me it!" into German with mir, a dative pronoun. This does not mean, however, that English has a dative case.

Moroi is a descriptive verb in Japanese. Japanese descriptive verbs are a subclass of Japanese verbs. Their behaviour isn't exactly the same, but they take most of the same endings and have mostly the same syntax. Japanese does not have a distinct class of words corresponding to the class called "adjectives" in English. It just has various expressions--some nominal in nature, some verbal--which can be translated into English using English adjectives.

[runa27]

... you do realize you are talking to one of the posters on here who studies individual languages and cultures, not Linguistics as a field, right? Someone who made it very explicit that she would have to look up IPA charts if somebody used it?

Keep in mind that you are way, way smarter and better-educated about Linguistics than I am, okay?

IS it one of these things? I don't care what you call them in Proper Linguistic Speak (well, that's a lie, I do, but MORE importantly), what I care about is how it's actually used in the language, so I can at least translate it in my head a little. Otherwise, you're just going to confuse me further, and we're back to square one

[muckefuck]

Um...that is how I would talk to a fourth grader. For the most part, I explain the linguistic terminology I use. The links to Wikipedia are mainly to provide you with more examples so I don't clutter up these posts with them.

I also am having trouble with the idea of a language that has nothing called an "adjective". I was always taught with the understanding that "adjective" is a word that modifies a noun with description.

Except that nouns can also modify nouns in English, e.g. sports car, Mom's carWord classes are language-specific. Many have close counterparts in other languages (verbs and nouns are the two most universal categories; some languages are said to have no nouns, but this claim is disputed