Re: CHAT When is a bath not a bath? (Re: Hymn to IKEA etc)

In Colombia... and I guess in most Spanish Leftpondia, "baño" is that
private or public room you use for evacuating body leftovers.  It might or
might not include a shower or bathtube.  "baño" is, well, a substantivation
of "bañar" (to bath), so it seems like the direct translation of bathroom.

IIRC, in Spain "baño" is reserved for the room in wich you bath, either if
it has toilet facilities or not.  Again: translation of "bathroom" calcing
patterns at each side of the pond.

Well.  "baño" for toilet room is a common word, usually used on spoken
language but rarely used on formal language.

In blueprints a toilet might be reffered as "WC", which the Spaniards say
and write "water", but other names I have seen: "mingitorio", "lavatorios"
(mainly in airplanes), "servicios".

In a public place, if you want to know where the toilet is without asking,
look for a couple of stilized man and woman figures.

Probably the most common words for indicating which is the man's room and
which the lady's room is "ellos" and "ellas" respectively (a far second
after the respective stilized man and woman figures).

rrej brown esk4i'Bjo :

> On Friday, February 27, 2004, at 12:33 AM, Joseph Fatula wrote:
> [snip]
> > You'd be hard pressed to find a "lavatory" around here, though about
> > half the people in this city would understand that "lava" means
"wash"...
>
> Actually you be fairly hard pressed over this side of the Pond also. Half
> a century or more ago (when I was a youngster), in private homes and
> public buildings we had little rooms called "lavatories" and there were
> dedicated buildings for public use called "conveniences" (tho the term we
> schoolboys used for both was simply 'bog' or sometimes the mock Latin
> 'bogitorium' [with hard g, and the plural being, of course, 'bogitoria']).
>
> Now in Britain they've all been transmogrified into "toilets" (which 50
> years back had only reached 'articles used in dressing, mode or
> process of dressing' in its gradual passage from 'small cloth' [<-- french
> 'toile <-- Latin 'te:la' = 'web'] to the modern meaning of 'place usd for
> urination and defecation' - what a semantic journey!)
Hmmm.   So Spanish "toalla" [to'aLa]/['twaj\a] seems a cognate?  Well, we
also have "tela" [tela].

toalla : towel
tela : fabric

Carlos Eugenio Thompson Pinzón
http://chlewey.org/cv/es/

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