Interesting name
Tag: language
Two telephones
Had two errands to run yesterday. Both involved buying a telephone.
This is the first.
And this is the other. Yes, that’s what they call it here.
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:
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.
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.
Apparently yes. Or at least, someone/thing is missing something.
Select a language
No idea what this app was. At any rate, it didn’t last long on my phone.
3 kg free
Always amusing to spot English words that seem out of place.
And the irony: the dog food container was a freebie from Equilíbrio, the same company. It holds only 15 kg.
So what to do with the “free” 3 kg? Fortunately, we ended up with two of these containers.
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.
Irónico
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.
Slightly ironic
A white truck called “colorado.”
“Real Estate” — in Uruguay — huh?
In case I’m being too obtuse, ray-al es-tot-ay is not in the language of this country. Does it matter? (But what’s the point of using English?)
OK, maybe in the morning I’ll call the number and see if they speak English. Maybe. Their web site ain’t promising in that regard.
Moving carton mystery
- All people leaving Uruguay move to English-speaking countries, or
- The moving companies has boxes in different languages, depending on the client, or
- They just love possessive apostrophes, or — ?