Tag: language

Inspirational

I found myself staring at the chopsticks (which we never use) that come with sushi from Tienda Inglesa, wondering what this message in Japanese might say. Something inspirational like

?

Bon appétit? Buen provecho? Happy sushi?

So I did the obvious (which nobody could do a few years ago) and ask ChatGPT (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, but you knew that).

Me: What does this say in English?

ChatGPT: The Japanese characters in the image are written vertically and read as: おはし (ohashi). In English, this means: “Chopsticks.” Let me know if you’d like help with pronunciation or more context!

Uh, no. I’m good….

Language fun

A flier showed up in our mailbox for the new droguería in town. Start with that: droguería translates as “drug store,” so what’s the one thing you would expect a droguería to not sell? Did you say drugs? Congratulations! They sell industrial chemicals, cleaning supplies, garden products, cleaning and beauty supplies…but not drugs. Here’s the flier:

 

advert

Deliveries without charge; that’s nice. But if you’re a native English speaker and your brain shuts down halfway through, you can read it as “deliveries without cargo.”

Worse, if you’ve lived in Uruguay a while, that almost seems right.

I’ve been gradually de-Googling, and was delighted to find an alternative to Google Translate that promised to be good.

 

translation

Alas, that delight was short-lived.

So, forget this – on to something practical: find out if the window people are ever going to measure for a screen, as promised weeks ago. Need their phone number. “Stuck to soccer field 5” seemed like a strange address, so I wondered if I was missing something.

sucked to football

 

Apparently yes. Or at least, someone/thing is missing something.

 

We don’t use that word here.

Unable to secure the pretty-but-pretty-malfunctional wooden doors of the barbacoa (which is an enclosed parillera, or cooking area), given the recent rains and humidity, I decided to abandon the door’s lock and install a hasp and padlock.

I didn’t know the word for hasp, so I looked it up: aldaba. (Fun Spanish fact: if a word begins with “al,” it came from Arabic.)

In the local ferretería, this word drew a blank look from the proprietor. I explained with my hands and a mention of candado (padlock). Aha! He knew exactly what I wanted and reached for it on a nearby display. It’ called [_____________], he explained, but the word went in one ear and out the other when I saw what he had just handed me.

aldaba

Irónico

delivery

You don’t need much knowledge of the Spanish language* to recognize that “delivery” is not part of it.

And you can easily understand the value of a word like parking in place of estacionamiento. But in this case, the English word — with four syllables — is actually, and unusually, shorter than its Spanish equivalent: entrega.

Go figure.

*Castilian, or castellano. There are eight other languages spoken in Spain.