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Subject:Re: luminous vs. light as adjectives From:Paul David Marvel <marvel -at- STRAUSS -dot- UDEL -dot- EDU> Date:Fri, 11 Feb 1994 19:37:35 -0500
On Fri, 11 Feb 1994, Stan Andermann wrote:
> The _real_ problem is that French as a language
> doesn't handle some aspects of cummunication (<--
> whoops, that's a error, Dr. Freud!) communication
> such as science and positions.
I don't agree with this statement. What you are seeing here is not a
deficiency of the French language but how languages work. For example, in
English, both "girl" and "woman" are subsets of "female." They share the
quality of "gender" but "girl" and "woman" are not interchangeable.
Similarly, both "light" and "luminous" are subsets of the French word
"lumineux." They both share the quality of "lumineux" but are not
interchangeable. French can express the same concepts as English, but you
have to use different words.
What I was trying to illustrate in the original post was a useful
translation trick. Often, if you look up a word in a French-only
dictionary like the _Larousse_ or _Little Robert_ and read the seperate
definitions, you can think of the proper English equivalent for each . You
can then create a rule to guide you while translating.
Paul D. Marvel
marvel -at- brahms -dot- udel -dot- edu
