The official language thread

I like playing Thimbleweed Park
I like to play Thimbleweed Park

Which one is right?

Both.

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As @milanfahrnholz said, both. But for Brits there might be a slight difference in meaning.

  • I like playing Thimbleweed Park. I enjoy the game.
  • I like to play Thimbleweed Park right now, not Monkey Island.

NB For American speakers like me they’re equal.

Interestingly, “I enjoy to play TWP” isn’t a possible sentence.

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“What do you do in your free time?”
“I like playing / I like to play Thimbleweed Park.”

As a statement on its own, the first one does convey the meaning “I enjoy the game”, and not only “I enjoy doing this activity”.

Yep, instead you would say “I enjoy playing TWP”.

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After reading this post from @tasse-tee, I wonder if the saying “a needle in a haystack” is also common in other languages? In Germany we have “Die Nadel im Heuhaufen” with the exact same meaning (and some adventure games have a puzzle with a needle in a haystack, btw). Is it very common around the world?

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In italian yes, it’s the same meaning (un ago in un pagliaio)

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I wonder how the expression “I can’t wait” is literally translated in other langauges.
In italian, we usually say two expressions:

  • I can’t see the hour (non vedo l’ora)
  • I can’t stay in my skin any further (non sto più nella pelle)

The meaning is the same: I want a certain event to happen immediately.

So, how do you translate “I can’t wait” in your mother language?

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The literally translation in German would be: “Ich kann nicht warten.” But that means that you have to go and can’t stay (here) any longer.

If you are waiting (excited) for something then you could translate “I can’t wait” with “Ich kann es kaum erwarten” (“I can hardly await it”).

So the German expression is close to the English one.

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Dutch is exactly the same.

Ik kan niet wachten (om…) = I can’t wait (to…).

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…because that is the correct spelling in English?

and yeah, she speaks half-German too! :wink:

mmmm I have the feeling we are getting a bit off-topic :scream:
perhaps we should split this discussion to the Official language thread, before @Calypso punishes us…

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Gee, I wonder how I know that?

index

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image

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This was hard to do without doing a @yrface pun.

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Hehe… more like what @tasse-tee said: “realized, criticized, synthesized”, all kinds of verbs ending in “ize/ise”

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In Finnish you can do the same. Huomenna (tomorrow), ylihuomenna (day after tomorrow), yliylihuomenna (day after the day after tomorrow), but never yliyliylihuomenna.

Eilen (yesterday), toissapäivänä (the day before yesterday).

In Finnish to do that, you’d need to continue the same logic that “toissapäivänä” (basically “in second day”, where the past tense is magically hidden in the word “second”) has, which would result as “kolmassapäivänä”, which is just nonsense…

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Sorry, I’m late to this party… To my knowledge the john is called the john because of John Harington, who invented the flushable toilet he named Ajax. Mistakenly people think the john was invented by a plumber Thomas Crapper, who successfully marketed his solution, but that was 300 years after John invented the john. But people call the john also the crapper because Crapper was so successfull with his crapper.

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I have (lately, for some reason) noticed that there are a lot of similar words between Italian and Finnish. Cravatta (kravatti) is one of them. Say, chitarra (kitara) is another. No wonder a song called “Olen suomalainen” (“I am a Finn”) is composed by Salvatore “Toto” Cutugno :smile:

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We have a domani (tomorrow) and dopodomani (after tomorrow) and you might even say dopodopodomani (after after tomorrow) but it’s usually tongue-in-cheek and not a real world, or at least not one you would use in a serious setup.

Then there’s ieri (yesterday) and avantieri (before yesterday) or l’altroieri (the other yesterday). But no avantavantieri. We say “three days ago” in that case.

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and then, there is “The day after tomorrow” that is “L’alba del giorno dopo” :thinking:

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