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
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.