Re: French and German (jara: An introduction)

Christian Thalmann scripsit:

> Well, "manch" isn't "many" as in a large number, but rather as
> in a significant number.
>
> I guess it's just one more of those delightful nuances of the
> German language that is flattened in the English translation.
Now that you point this out, I think that "many a" may have precisely
this semantic; "a significant number of" rather than "many".  But it
is fairly rare:  there are only about 859,000 instances of "many a"
in Google, but 121,000,000 instances of "many".

I was trying without success to lay my hands on the English translation
of "Morgenrot, Morgenrot" to see what it made of "Ich und mancher Kamerad",
but no luck.  Google only reports the first two lines ("Morning red,
morning red / Will you shine upon me dead?") because they are quoted in
another song of the same name.

--
A poetical purist named Cowan           [that's me: jcowan@reutershealth.com]
Once put the rest of us dowan.          [on xml-dev]
    "Your verse would be sweeter        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
    If it only had metre                http://www.reutershealth.com
And rhymes that didn't force me to frowan."     [overpacked line!] --Michael Kay

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