I don’t think I like this language. I learned yesterday (nevery mind why) that the word for “labia” is literally “shame-lips”. Phooey. (Though I should note that apparently the word “schaam” is used for anything pubic, so at least it’s not just an anti-woman thing.)
Today I finally found my perfect boots, or at least a pair perfect except for costing considerably more than I’d have liked to spend. Still, they are black, comfy, good-looking, classic and versatile in style, and thanks to a deeper elastic insert than most they fit both my feet and my calves. (What I’d like to do now is to find a more casual pair for much cheaper in brown. Not that I don’t already have brown boots and for that matter black ones, but mine are much lower. I may try harder to resist that urge, however.)
I now have a bank account, so I feel like I’ve taken one more step toward fitting in here. I decided not to get a library card for the moment, because it costs €36 and the selection of English books is quite limited. Maybe if I can eventually read Dutch well enough to function without an English gloss beside it I’ll get one then. At the moment, I find that for example when I have instructions in say, Dutch, French and German but not English, I understand the French better than the Dutch. And I’ve never studied French. On the othe hand we went out for tapas last night and I didn’t need an English menu at all – between the Spanish names and the Dutch descriptions for each dish I had no trouble figuring out the menu. One problem I do have with more complex text is that lot of fairly basic Dutch words are long, polysyllabic, and begin with ge- or on-, so that it’s difficult for me to remember which is which. “Easy” is gemakkelijk, for example (or something like that – working from memory here). And difficult is “moeilijk” – three and four vowels in a row are not uncommon.
‘Shame lips’??? Ugh. ~LA
Until one runs into a charge in another country, we don’t realize how wonderful American public libraries are.
Hm. It all sounds Old Englishy (the ge- and on- prefixes particularly) to me.
Though I can’t find anything to mitigate the whole “shame lips” thing. (“Shame” seems to come from an old Teutonic root, and it appears to be the same ancestor for the Dutch, too.) However, the pre-Teutonic root appears to be a word meaning “to cover.” As in, you cover things up of which you are ashamed. So, initially, it coulda just meant the parts you cover up, but now it’s all twisty, and boy does this really explain the Dutch Reformed Calvinist movement to me!
(end ramble)
Labia is “shame lips” in Danish as well if you translate it literally, but like Mer says, the word originally meant ‘to cover’ and I don’t think you’d find any Dane who thinks it has anything to do with being ashamed at all.
Similarily I think you’ll find (at least this is the case in both Danish and German, and Dutch has a lot in common with both) that nipples are called “breast warts” – something with unpleasant connotations in English, but nobody thinks twice of it here, because while warts in themselves are unpleasant, as soon as it’s prefaced with ‘breast’, it isn’t.
… I still do prefer the English word though! It just… SOUNDS better.
Are you sure ‘moeilijk’ means difficult? I’ll be quick to state that you may very well be right – like I’ve said before I’ve never learned Dutch, just picked up a couple of things from my knowledge of other languages, but in German ‘moelich’ means ‘possible’, so it just seemed odd to me that two so similar words would have almost exactly opposite meanings. But hey – you live in the country, I don’t, so you’re probably right 🙂
Mer – yes, very Old Englishy – I think I wrote about that earlier. Maria, not sure – I couldn’t remember the word offhand so did a quick Google. So it’s definitely difficult, but possibly only in some contexts. I just looked up an English-to-Dutch dictionary, and it lists four words of which moeilijk is the second.
One of my books actually discusses that whole breast wart thing and how it not only isn’t unpleasant in context but gives a different dimension to the word wart in general, so that the word wart itself is seen as one that’s only unpleasant in some contexts. (The book was probably Le Ton Beau de Marot, but my copy is currently somewhere in transit.)