Re: CHAT drinking soup: (was: Malat (on behalf of Garrett))

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> > Not so easy - it's not always, in Brit.English at least, simply whether the
> > food is solid or liquid - it also _how_ it's consumed   ;)
> >
> > Logics or semantics?  Idiom, it seems to me - the things that make natlangs
> > so confoundedly tricky and yet gives them piquancy & stops them being
> > boring.
>
> At least in my dialect, "drink" can only apply to liquid substances,
> and, in addition, only to substances which are consumed for the purposes
> of *sustaining* life, or taken as if it were a substance which sustains
> life.  That is, one does not "drink" medicine, one "takes" it, since it
> restores, rather than sustains.  Also, one does not "drink" poison, one
> "swallows" it, because it harms, or even ends, life.  The exception is
> in suicide, you may use "drink", if it's swallowed intentionally, and
> ingested as if it were a normal drink.  For example, I would say that
> the Jonestown suicides were commited by "drinking" poison, but I would
> not say of a person who accidentally ingests poison that they "drank"
> it.
So, when one slowly poisons oneself with alcohol... one is *mot* drinking?
The main difference in Spanish between _beber_/_tomar_ and _comer_, as I know, is
the state of the matter: solid or liquid, but there is a difference in some
substances.  In Argentina one says "beber un helado" (to drink and ice cream) but
in Colombia the expresion is "comer un helado" (to eat an ice cream).  But one
could argue ice creams are somehow liquid (some expert?).

In Colombia, is most common to use _tomar_ (which also means _to take_), and
_beber_ is used mainly with alcoholic drinks.  So the exprestions are:
    tomar sopa    drink/eat soup
    tomar veneno    swallow/take poison
    tomar/beber agua    drink water
    tomar/beber jugo    drink juice
    tomar/beber cerveza    drink beer
    tomar/beber vino    drink wine
    comer helado    eat ice cream

--
Carlos Eugenio Thompson Pinzsn
  ITEC-Telecom, Colombia

  cthompso@alpha.telecom-co.net
  http://alpha.telecom-co.net/~cthompso/