50 words for snow

[wosny]

I have some jars of home made strawberry "jam-elly" which has jam with fruit in the top half of the jar and just clear jelly in the bottom half. It was due to a bit of a failure in my jam making technique, but in general the two things are cooked in different ways, jam has the sugar added to the fresh fruit and jelly has the sugar added to the

Comments

[laudre]

French "cahier" ~= English "workbook" (at least, American English).

In American English, both "jelly" and "jam" can be used as the catchall term for fruit preserves (we also understand, but less commonly use, "preserves" in the same role). Many (most?) people are aware of there being a distinction between jellies and jams (without being entirely clear on what the distinction actually is), but given that most of us Americans get our jellies and jams at the supermarket, from the same shelves and basically sold and used as interchangeable products, it's not something we spend much time thinking about. People who do make their own preserves, however, are not only aware that there's a distinction, but they know what the distinction is and will refer to the type of preserve appropriately, in my experience (just like any interest that has its own jargon, which is most of them).

As for other words ... I've never found a word in any language I've studied that corresponds to the English word home. That's not to say that the associated

[wosny]

I feel that workbook is just adding an adjective to "book"...
Thanks for the jelly/jam clarification.

Heim in German seems to carry the home feeling? It was apparantly from unheimlich that the US gained the word homely as meaning plain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny

[biascut]

You can get all the connotations of "home" in German, but you have to use various different expressions. Heim and Heimat would cover most of the emotional senses of home in terms place-where-you-come-from-and-have-feelings-about, but for things like "at home" or "going home" it'd be zu Hause and nach Hause.

[wosny]

Absolutely, and I have no real fluency in German. :)

[sidheag]

"Moth" is not a species any more than "butterfly" is, and the Wikipedia article anyway suggests that English's use of the word "moth" for certain Lepidoptera is more than a bit arbitrary. Given that French has two words, mite and phalène, for different certain lepidoptera, I don't think it's reasonable to see this as a deficit in French.

[wosny]

Hmm, phalène is not a word I know, but it seems to describe a particular kind of moth. Mites are like pests, such as clothes moths or the ones that eat dried goods.
http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/phal%C3%A8ne

[aksioma_tg]

In Russian we have a word for 24 hours (like day AND night), for example. It doesn't exist in English.
But I really wish a preposition like "by" existed in Russian. It is so easy to say "a book by..", "music by...", whatever. It always gives me a hard time to translate these frases.

[wosny]

I am not sure when prepositions were developed, I think originally in languages such as Latin or Greek it was implied by the end of the noun... I am just remembering very vaguely Latin declensions, "by, with or from a table" However I am excedingly grateful for the simpler grammar that separate prepositions bring!

[aksioma_tg]

Well, we have prepositions (sure!), but not this one.

[muckefuck]

Latin has prepositions. (Who do you think came up with the word!) It just also has more situations where the declension of the noun alone expresses meanings which more analytical languages (like English and French) express by means of prepositions, word order, or both.

[mamculuna]

In my southern version of American English, the distinction between "jam" and "jelly" is that jelly is usually clear and jelled, but "jam" is softer and contains fruit, just as you describe. When I make "jam," I just use sugar and fruit, but when I make "jelly," I strain out the fruit and use just the juice but usually include some pectin (maybe from apples). I'm not sure that everyone uses the words that way, but seems to be what the labels in the stores use. I never use the two words interchangeably, but don't doubt that others do.

I've always thought of "notebook" as being roughly equivalent to "cahier." Maybe I'm wrong!

I'd love an English word for Schadenfreude!

[wosny]

I see, jam exists in AE, I hadn't realised. :)

I think for me, one could say book or notebook, whereas a cahier and a livre are not interchangeable.

Perhaps that wouldn't be true in the US.

[teaoli]

"Book" and "notebook" are definitely not interchangeable in any variety of AmEng I've ever heard.

[iddewes]

Nor in British English...

[mack_the_spoon]

From my experience (which is, granted, nowhere near native speaker level), ban in both Lao and Thai is a pretty close correspondence to "home" in English. I can say "yu ban" to mean both "at home, my house that I'm renting as I live here" and also to mean "at home, in America". Of course, ban also has a different meaning that English doesn't have: "village" or "neighborhood".

BTW, I've lived in the Pacific Northwest of the US most of my life and always had a difference between jam and jelly - jam being preserves with pieces of fruit, and jelly being clear without the pieces of fruit. I still call the sandwich a "peanut butter and jelly" sandwich, no matter what kind of fruit spread it has, though.