Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Tempo

I don't like the idea of having only one word to refer both to time and weather. To me these are totally discrete concepts that should have their own word, I don't care what language you're talking about. Portuguese and Italian have tempo, Latin tempus, Spanish tiempo, French and Catalan temps and Romanian is the only lucky Romance language to have two words: timp (time) and vreme (weather). Vreme is clearly a word of Slavic language, cf. Russian время, which, oddly enough, means time. Macedonian време can mean both. Is that maybe where Romanians got their word?
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3 comments:

  1. SparnaiFriday, December 15, 2006 9:40:00 PM

    I don't like the idea of having only one word to refer both to repetition counts and multiples.

    Cf.
    I have been to Jerusalem three times.
    and
    Jerusalem is three times as large as Tzfat.

    ReplyDelete
  2. světluškaSaturday, December 16, 2006 8:41:00 PM

    Do you know of any language that doesn't use the same word in this case?

    ReplyDelete
  3. SparnaiMonday, December 25, 2006 7:26:00 PM

    Japanese
    回 for repetition count (一回、二回 etc.)
    倍 for multiplying numbers/quantity (一倍、二倍 etc.)

    ReplyDelete