Re: "In spite of"

On Mon, 4 Aug 2008 12:32:45 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:

>Jim Henry writes:
...
>> In trying to come up with a way to render the meaning of English
>> "despite" / "in spite of", Esperanto "malgraux", French "malgré", the best
>> thing I've managed to think of so far is to coin a root word
>> {m&#301;l} from which the postposition {m&#301;l-i}, "in spite of" is derived;
>> however -- this is the unsatisfactory part -- the only gloss I have
>> for the root word {m&#301;l} itself is "in-spite-of-ness".
>>...
>
>German has 'trotz' + GEN, where used as a noun, 'Trotz' means
>'defiance'.  So that might be what you're looking for.
The Grimms' wordbook surprisingly links the prepositional use to an older
interjectional use, and by the way points out that the dative is more
original than the genitive:

http://germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/WBB/woerterbuecher/dwb/cdrom/wbgui?word=trotz&lemid=GT11531

But why go for other languages when English "despite" also offers a
semantics, something along the line of 'in contempt of'.

--
grüess
mach

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