Je Suivie le Roi Mon frere à Bareut et de la Strasbourg ou nous etant arrette qu'un jours nous nous rendimes a Wesell
Me: Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward, "where we had stopped just for a day," what's the prob -- oh. Yeah.
I see that your friend has confirmed, but yes, I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
Good grief, yes, same here to both what you were saying. I imagine Ziebura was just very exhausted the day she transcribed this...
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz. (Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
Good grief, yes, same here to both what you were saying. I imagine Ziebura was just very exhausted the day she transcribed this...
Either that, or she was just going from memory. You and I have written some stuff in salon that would make me question your command of German and my command of English if I thought we had written it while staring at the text in question, but no, we were summarizing what we remembered.
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz.
Very true! Bilingualism is complicated. It's possible Ziebura was very fluent in French, but had a moment of what linguists call "linguistic interference" and what laypeople call "a brain fart." ;)
(Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
So did I! But that doesn't mean a word can't have multiple meanings, or that the meaning can't change over time. We've seen "Sodomie" change meanings in German since the 18th century, from "sexual deviance including homosexuality" to "bestiality".
And looking at Larousse, I see "Appréhender quelqu'un par autorité de justice ou de police, l'incarcérer" *is* a possible meaning for "arrêter", it's just not the most common one that you and I would learn in first-year French.
What convinced me that this wasn't "we were arrested" was the "qu'", which I didn't learn in first or second year French could mean "only/just/no more than." I only learned that in the last couple years of French practice, which is why I referred to my "recently improved" French. So either AW is saying they were only arrested one day, or that they only spent one day there, and then it becomes a question of pragmatics. Saying you went to a whole other country but only for one day: totally normal. I myself would say "I've been to Prague, but only for one day." Casually mentioning you were arrested but only for one day: only makes sense if that's not a big deal (compared to something that is a big deal). Since it *would* have been a big deal for the King and Crown Prince of Prussia to be arrested, that reading only works for me if there are claims that they were arrested for more than one day. Since I'm not seeing those claims, "only spent one day" is the only reasonable reading I can get out of this.
The reason I asked my friend: Larousse says that "arrêter" means "spend time" when it's reflexive, i.e., I would expect AW to have written "nous nous etant arrette." I wanted to check that my reading was still okay without the extra "nous". Since my friend says it is, we're good.
Speaking of words that can have more than one meaning, I meant to add that our friend "douceurs" that we ran into in the Leining letters and which Selena translated "sweets" and I commented I only knew it as "gratuities" in English...I have now run into the "gratuities" meaning in both the Keith papers *and* the Berlin Kriminal Senat's judgment on Pfeiffer. (Either that, or they're giving out candy in some weird contexts. :P) So it seems that had both meanings, or else Leining was borrowing from French.
Okay, I can't find it in Duden, but the Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache defines "Douceur" as "Trinkgeld", i.e. tip, and says it's old-fashioned. Since I can't come up with any other reading of the Leining sentence than the way Selena read it, i.e., with Fritz being the recipient, and since there's a food context, "Douceur" might actually have only meant "tip/gratuity" in German, but Leining was thinking in French, where it does mean "sweets" in the plural. I've often found it hard in these older texts to tell if someone is using the French word instead of the German word ad hoc, because the French word was the first one to come to their mind, or because they're speaking German and the French word was a widely used French loanword in German.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-08-26 05:40 am (UTC)Me: Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward, "where we had stopped just for a day," what's the prob -- oh. Yeah.
I see that your friend has confirmed, but yes, I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
Nice find :D
Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-08-26 06:24 am (UTC)This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz. (Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-08-26 05:15 pm (UTC)Either that, or she was just going from memory. You and I have written some stuff in salon that would make me question your command of German and my command of English if I thought we had written it while staring at the text in question, but no, we were summarizing what we remembered.
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz.
Very true! Bilingualism is complicated. It's possible Ziebura was very fluent in French, but had a moment of what linguists call "linguistic interference" and what laypeople call "a brain fart." ;)
(Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
That does make sense.
French loanwords
Date: 2024-08-26 05:12 pm (UTC)So did I! But that doesn't mean a word can't have multiple meanings, or that the meaning can't change over time. We've seen "Sodomie" change meanings in German since the 18th century, from "sexual deviance including homosexuality" to "bestiality".
And looking at Larousse, I see "Appréhender quelqu'un par autorité de justice ou de police, l'incarcérer" *is* a possible meaning for "arrêter", it's just not the most common one that you and I would learn in first-year French.
What convinced me that this wasn't "we were arrested" was the "qu'", which I didn't learn in first or second year French could mean "only/just/no more than." I only learned that in the last couple years of French practice, which is why I referred to my "recently improved" French. So either AW is saying they were only arrested one day, or that they only spent one day there, and then it becomes a question of pragmatics. Saying you went to a whole other country but only for one day: totally normal. I myself would say "I've been to Prague, but only for one day." Casually mentioning you were arrested but only for one day: only makes sense if that's not a big deal (compared to something that is a big deal). Since it *would* have been a big deal for the King and Crown Prince of Prussia to be arrested, that reading only works for me if there are claims that they were arrested for more than one day. Since I'm not seeing those claims, "only spent one day" is the only reasonable reading I can get out of this.
The reason I asked my friend: Larousse says that "arrêter" means "spend time" when it's reflexive, i.e., I would expect AW to have written "nous nous etant arrette." I wanted to check that my reading was still okay without the extra "nous". Since my friend says it is, we're good.
Speaking of words that can have more than one meaning, I meant to add that our friend "douceurs" that we ran into in the Leining letters and which Selena translated "sweets" and I commented I only knew it as "gratuities" in English...I have now run into the "gratuities" meaning in both the Keith papers *and* the Berlin Kriminal Senat's judgment on Pfeiffer. (Either that, or they're giving out candy in some weird contexts. :P) So it seems that had both meanings, or else Leining was borrowing from French.
Okay, I can't find it in Duden, but the Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache defines "Douceur" as "Trinkgeld", i.e. tip, and says it's old-fashioned. Since I can't come up with any other reading of the Leining sentence than the way Selena read it, i.e., with Fritz being the recipient, and since there's a food context, "Douceur" might actually have only meant "tip/gratuity" in German, but Leining was thinking in French, where it does mean "sweets" in the plural. I've often found it hard in these older texts to tell if someone is using the French word instead of the German word ad hoc, because the French word was the first one to come to their mind, or because they're speaking German and the French word was a widely used French loanword in German.