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Even live languages have words, that are often used in normal speech, but cannot optimally be translated to other languages, and carry no real meaning on their
by ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Even live languages have words, that are often used in normal speech, but cannot optimally be translated to other languages, and carry no real meaning on their own, except in some cases set the tone.
eg. "bre" in serbian is one of those words, where "nemoj da jedeš to" i "nemoj bre da jedeš to" mean basically the same thing ("don't eat that").
- daptaq 5y agoI always thought of it as a kind of more abstract "bro"?
- tomerv 5y agoAnother example: ¡Vamos! It's kind of like "let's go", but carries more weight than its English translation. Some other languages have similar idioms for hurrying people up, but some languages simply don't.
- imajoredinecon 5y agoIncluding the indispensable https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D9%87 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A7%D9%84%D9...
- contravariant 5y agoEven English has words with similar properties, compare for instance "don't eat that" and "don't fucking eat that".
- bradrn 5y agoI don’t know Serbo–Croatian at all, but Wiktionary suggests colloquial English interjections like ‘man’, ‘the hell’ as adequate translations: ‘don’t eat that, man!’.
- OJFord 5y agoIt sounds like what's called an 'emphatic particle', in Hindi at least (तो, 'to') which marks the topic or shifts emphasis in a sentence.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago> "bre" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bre#Serbo-Croatian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bre#Serbo-Croatian