Re: Character description

Dan Goodman <dsgood@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Catja Pafort wrote:

Dan Goodman <dsgood@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Irina Rempt wrote:

The kind of cabbage that makes a tightly closed head can stay
fresh enough to eat for months, if kept in a cool but frost-free
cellar.

US term: root cellar.

In German, I know it as 'Kartoffelkeller'.

Which isn't in any of the online dictionaries onelook.com searches.
But "Kartoffel" is; potato. I wonder if there was an older word.

When looking Germanic words up in a dictionary, you frequently need to
split them into two or more. So you find "Kartoffel" in the dictionary,
delete it from the original word, and look up the remainder, ie "Keller"
(if you haven't guessed already that it's a simple cognate of "cellar").

Many machine translation programs haven't caught on to this simple rule.

(Okay, it's not always that simple -- sometimes there's a random linking
letter or two between the parts -- but I'd have thought it simple enough
to teach a machine. <thinks> Though I guess pattern matching is more
processor intensive than whole-word matching.)

Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
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