Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Catalan

Here's a little Catalan joy for you...

Devia donar-se un cop ell mateix.

Devia = he probably had

donar = given

-se = himself

un cop = a hit

ell mateix = himself.

So we have.....He probably gave himself a hit, himself.

Què???????

This sentence is actually in my workbook and I have to restate it in two different ways starting with:

potser = maybe or probably
and
I si = and if

Maybe he hit himself, himself

and if he hit himself himself....but this is an incomplete sentence.?????

I will have to ask about this one.

OMG

5 comments:

kate said...

I'm curious about this one! Did you finally figure it out? And a nosy question-- does The Man speak Catalan? Just curious...

oreneta said...

The man does speak Catalan, it is his mother tongue but he can barely write it (almost not at all) though he can read it.

The Catalans love a refelxive as far as I can tell. They use them hugely...em dutxo, I shower, but the em is a refelxive pronoun and then there are the myself phrase...jo mateix for myself, ell mateix for himself. This sentence is just particularily reflexive.

Strange to me. Do the Spanish do this? You can use the refexive phrase jo/tu/ell/nosaltres etc mateix with non-reflexive verbs, indeed it seems to be more normal.

kate said...

Yes, they do. For example, the sentence you mention would be similar: Se dio un golpe. He hurt himself (or she.) Or, Se dio un golpe él mismo. That repeats the "himself" part to give it more emphasis. And they use the reflexives for showering etc. also.

Anonymous said...

OHM- my head hurts just thinking about learning the language!!

If I lived there, I would buy a translator program app for my iphone and just push a button to talk for me each time. LOL

oreneta said...

Now THAT's a good idea!