"Quite a few" is an expression used in English. It always confuses me. I looked in wiktionary dot org and it says "more than a few", "a fair number of". Is it midway between a few and many?
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Linguistic doubt.
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In the USA we tend to hear "quite a lot" more often than you would use "quite a few". Check out this site for different words that you might hear that mean pretty much the same thing: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/quite%20a%20few"God knows why it is that my pianoforte music always makes the worst impression on me, especially when it is played badly." -Beethoven 1804.
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Originally posted by Enrique View PostThen I can say "quite a few trees" is a larger quantity than "a few trees"? But not as large as "many trees"? Or only larger than expected?
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Originally posted by Enrique View PostI see. I don't understand how a person coming from abroad into a country can ever speak like a native, even if he has stayed in that country for several years. I appreciate your kindness.
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Well, in a translation of a German book into Spanish the translator (or rather the publishing house chief) said that expressions were not translated so that they fit into the spirit of the Spanish language but, on the contrary, they were left in the German way of saying things. The exact opposite of what I believed was a good translation. Actually it was a book on philosophy and, here, clarity is essential.
I understand in Colombia they speak good Spanish, which is not the case in other Latin American countries, specially Mexico.Last edited by Enrique; 01-10-2020, 06:08 PM.
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Colombian Spanish is probably the closest to Spain. They often refer to it as Castellano en vez de espanol. It is interesting to me about the comparison to Mexican Spanish, though, as I work with a lot of Mexicans and speak to them in their language. There are a lot of differences, both linguistic and cultural. Some of them I have a hard time understanding because they tend to slur words together. But when I hear someone from Bogota I almost immediately know where the person is from because of the clarity of the pronunciation.
That is interesting about the German translation; there are hard things to translate directly, like tomar pelo, for example. (Not even sure if that makes sense to you; in Colombian Spanish it means teasing.)
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Yes, tomar el pelo, to make fun of. Castellano is a term I prefer (as against espanol). Take any of the modern western languages and you'll find the name of the language coincides with the demonym, Spain being an exception. That is a remarkable fact. The word Castellano speaks about history, tells about the origins of the language. What is the necessity of uniformization?
In spite of the fact that English is a Germanic language and Spanish is a romance, I find striking similarities between them. There are so many things we say in exactly the same way! Aside from the fact that English is completely penetrated by Latin. If an Spaniard opens an English dictionary he will find 75 per cent of the words come from Latin. Because they sound familiar to him.
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Originally posted by Enrique View PostThen I can say "quite a few trees" is a larger quantity than "a few trees"? But not as large as "many trees"? Or only larger than expected?
"We have a few trees" is more than "We have few trees"."If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." - G.K. Chesterton
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Originally posted by Enrique View PostCould you explain the meaning of your joke to a non-English speaker (I guess it is a joke), Hollywood?
"When something is translated into another language, and sometimes translated back into the original language, and because of differences of the languages, some of the original meaning is lost."
It's interesting to see the different meanings for the same word in British english and in American english. Ah, those pesky colonists.
Here's a fun website called British Translator & Slang Dictionary where you can translate British to American & American to British slang.
https://www.translatebritish.com/reverse.phpLast edited by Hollywood; 03-15-2020, 08:08 AM."God knows why it is that my pianoforte music always makes the worst impression on me, especially when it is played badly." -Beethoven 1804.
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But, wait a moment, please. According to that definition, what is that that is lost in translation? The thing translated or the translator?
Some ten years ago a friend of mine showed me a computer program which translated between English and Spanish. I then gave the program the first sentence in Don Quijote de la Mancha and order it to put it into English. And then I asked it to translate the English resulting sentence into Spanish. You couldn't believe the disparate I got. Of course languages change in a span of four hundred years. Nowadays mechanical translation is much more accurate.
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