Re: Character description

Zeborah wrote:

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").

Oh -- I took that so much for granted that I didn't bother to look up
Keller.

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



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