Christina Websell wrote:
"Marina" wrote in message
...

Christina Websell wrote:

She sometimes confounds me though. What is the difference between a road
and a street?

I can answer this. ) dons linguist's cap

Thank you, Marina. I hoped I could depend on one of our translators ;-)

The word road comes from
Proto-Germanic. It has the same root as the word ride. Street comes from
Latin strata. English is a mish-mash of loans from different languages,
but its core comes from the Germanic languages of the Angles, Saxons and
Jutes, so it shouldn't be too hard for Nüle to recognize the words.
I think that road tends to be used more of country roads, while streets
are in the city.

That was the distinction that I told her, that a street tended have have
houses lining it. But then I thought that the hard surface was always
called a road, even if it was a street; like - warning to a child "keep
off the road!"

In the other languages I know well, Finnish and Swedish, there is the same
distinction, so I suspect there are similar words in German as well.
They're not all strasses, are they?

Indeed they are not. Nüle lives right out in the wilds where roads tend to
be single track, not a strasse to be seen! Her address is "Am Dorfplatz"
which she tells me means something like "on the village green."
It's an area called the Wendland, fairly remote between Hamburg and
Hannover.

The street would be a "Strasse", and the road a "Weg" (like the Swedish
väg), but then there's the "Landstrasse", which is a country road...

I'd translate the "Am Dorfplats" as something like 'at/on/by the village
square' where the square would be (have been) used as a market square,
but if Nüle herself sees the "Platz" as a green, then who am I to argue.

and:
When I say I have to move out of the sun into the shadow, why do you call
it the shade? That one is still ongoing.. Any explanation appreciated.

This I can't give a very exact answer to, but it seems that shade is the
older form of the word, so I suppose the idiomatic 'move into the shade'
has been established before shadow has come into use as a synonym for
shade.

The jury is still out on this, as N cannot accept yet that to move into the
shadow of a tree, for example, does not mean *just* that, that she is "in
the shadow". Trouble is, all her arguments about English use sound so
logical!

My take on the shadow/shade issue (please note, this is only my personal
opinion) is that shadow is the actual shadow (the 'item'), whereas shade
would be more like a place. But then there are the shades of colours
messing things up...

--
Christine in Vantaa, Finland
christal63 (at) gmail (dot) com
photos: http://photos.yahoo.com/christal63
photos: http://community.webshots.com/user/chkr63