Re: Words with multiple meanings across languages

From: piotr panek (piotrpanek_at_onegazetatwo.threeplfour)
Date: 10/05/04 

Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 12:32:55 +0200

Dnia 04-10-04 15:36, w liście od osoby znanej jako juuitchan@hotmail.com
było:

> I recently posted something about the two meanings of "orange".
>
> Here are others: "degree" and "minute".
>
> As for "degree": the word is the same whether you are talking about
> degrees of arc or of temperature.

It is probably due to Latin-speaking community of scientists. In Polish
for example there's a word "stopień", which means "degree" as 1/360 of
full circle, 1/273 of the distance between absolute zero and the point
of water freezing, but it also means "step in stairs" (conf.
'stopa'=foot) and degree in the meaning of a level...

>Is this not true across many
> languages? Are there exceptions?
>
> Same with "minute": minute of time and minute of arc, is this not so?

Polish "minuta" - 1/60 of a degree, 1/60 of an hour, but it's origins
are in Babylonian system of counting and measuring...

>
> What other words are there like this? Is "dream" one? ("My dream is to
> marry Lisa" vs. "Last night I dreamt I married Lisa")

Well - it is not so simple. Polish "marzyć"=day dream, and "śnić"=dream
asleep, but in poetry you can find "śnić" in the meaning of daydreaming
and the story you dream about is called "marzenie senne"...

>
> Is there a list of these?

Are you kidding? :-)

What I found between Polish and English is eg.
property - własność - 'the posession/ the feature'
to embrace - obejmować - 'to humb / to include'

Probably there is a plenty of such similarities between Indoeuropean
languages (due to common origins) and just European languages (including
non-IE - due to cultural community), of which we are not aware, since we
do not expect, that in othe languages they don't share the same meaning.
The example (even if it is a bogus, it doesn't matter in this case) of
multiple words meaning snow in Eskimo shows this aspect...

But for example I can find some differences between Polish and English.
For example - Polish word "pływać" means "to swim" and "to float" as
well. There's no good Polish equivalent of "to go" (there are
equivalents of "to walk", "to drive/to be driven") etc.
piotrek

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