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Good Day Fellow Posters,
I have a quick question in using the dictionary.
Here is an example when I searched for a word:
Το λεξικό βρήκε 1 λέξη.
What is the difference between the two words--is it a gender thing or just two ways of saying the same thing?
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It just means that the English word "weird" can, according to this dictionary, be translated by the Greek words αλλόκοτος or απόκοσμος.This does not mean that they are necessarily synonyms: the English word "weird" covers all kinds of connotations that are not necessarily covered by a single word in Greek. There's never a one-to-one correspondence between words of different languages. I personally find that the best way to handle a dictionary search returning more than one match is to do an inverse search on the words found. Taking your example, this means doing a search on both αλλόκοτος and απόκοσμος. If you do that, you'll find:
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Hi Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets,
True words will never align themselves in languages
Thanks for the information.
It is a good idea to try to reverse it into the dictionary.
So I tried it with the word "second", as in length of time. Both Greek typed words yielded the same result. So does that then make them interchangeable or can it be a gender thing? |
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Hi Cub Cubbettee, I suppose you are referring to the following results: δεύτερος, δευτερόλεπτο defteros, defterolepto If this is the case, then δεύτερος means second in something (in line, in command, etc.) Δευτερόλεπτο on the other hand referes to a time fraction. So we say that 60 seconds is 1 minute or that 60 δευτερόλεπτα είναι 1 λεπτό (minute). In english they are both translated as "second", so you need to place the word in a specific context to give it a meaning. Kind regards, Jim |
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As Dimitris showed you, "second" doesn't only refer to a length of time, but also to an ordinal number, which in Greek are translated differently. So once again, no, the Greek results are not interchangeable. Dictionary search is tricky, and you need to have a good understanding of both the source and the target language to get it right. Even reversed search doesn't always help (although cases like "second" are relatively uncommon). As for your comment "or can it be a gender thing?", I don't understand where you could get the idea that it could be a gender thing. Dictionaries normally don't list gender alternatives as separate words, except when they are completely different words like "uncle and "aunt", but you would expect those to appear only with words referring to people (like γιος: "son" and κόρη: "daughter"), in which case English most often has separate words too (actually more often than Greek). You wouldn't expect such gender differences to show up for a noun like "second" (as in length of time, why would such a noun have gendered alternatives?) and especially not for an adjective like "weird" (where gender alternatives are grammatical, and thus normally not listed in a dictionary. You need to know you are looking at an adjective, and guess its type and gender forms from its ending. A dictionary will only list the masculine form). Just like dictionaries don't list the past tense of verbs as a separate word from the present tense, they don't list gender alternatives either. |
