CONLANG Digest - 28 Sep 2003 to 29 Sep 2003 (#2003-275)

> Date:    Mon, 29 Sep 2003 17:47:08 +0200
> From:    Arnt Richard Johansen <arj@...>
> Subject: Re: Not so OT: German "Satz"
>
> On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > A li'l question on German terminology for the lists linguistically
> enlightened
> > germanophones: The word _Satz_ can mean both "sentence" and "clause"; how
> do
> > you differentiate when necessary?
>
> Then I must ask you; how do you do that in Swedish? In Norwegian, they are
> "hovedsetning" and "bisetning", respectively. But in compounds, only the
> last (semantically wider) part is used, so we get, e.g. "relativsetning"
> (relative clause).  This is unambiguous, since relative "sentences" don't
> exist.
>
> My Norwegian->German dictionary says "Hauptsatz" and "Nebensatz",
> respectively. Though you can't trust that of course, since dictionaries
> often translate to uncommon words in the target language to retain the
> largest accuracy possible.
_Hauptsatz_ and _Nebensatz_ mean respectively "main clause" and "secondary
clause" - the corresponding terms in Sweden are _huvudsats_ and _bisats_.
Surely the Norwegian words mean the same - _hovedsetning_ for "sentence" would
be just criminal!

The Swedish for "sentence" is _mening_ (which also means "sense, significance",
as well as "opinion").

                                                                Andreas

Reply