I can think of a few more meanings for the German "ausmachen": to agree on (especially with contracts, but also things like "agree on a date"), to spot something ("etwas in der Ferne ausmachen"), or to amount to something (close to constitute, I guess).

Language is fun.

uitmaken - extinguish, matter, constitute, conclude

concepts--essence, wholeness, fulfillment/completion?

So, extinguished--cycle has ended, essence, wholeness were fulfilled; matter (I'm assuming this is as in "It matters" not "It's made of matter"), constitute, conclude--all have essence, fulfillment?

Or something. I'm getting dizzy.

Tzedakah can mean "charity"; it can mean "justice";
it can mean "the right thing"; and it can mean something close to "saintly".

I do not grok.

#3: Reminds me of the I Ching, how I read Tarot, or Sufi word-root change-ringing.

The word "tzdaka" means "righteously given charity" or "alms". It uses the same three-letter stem as "tzedek", which is "justice" or "the ethical thing" (not "the right thing" except in the sense that "ethical" means "right" - it refers to moral/ethical rightness rather than factual rightness or emotional rightness).

The same three-letter stem also is used to form the word "tzadiq", which is not a saint (which has its own specific meanings) but a "righteous person".

Other words from the same stem (in masculine form):
"tzodek" - he or she is factually correct;
"hitztadek" - he made excuses (to justify his bad behavior or other lapses);
"hutzdak" - it was justified (as in an expense).

Each of these is its own individual word, and trying to see them as belonging to one general concept (justification? justice? ethics? rightness?) will lead to some pretty odd Hebrew.

'Have some Madeira, m'dear! ...'

(And then the sources walked out, so I could inquire no further.)

Jack turns on the light.
Jack turns on 39th Street.
Jack turns on Susan.
Jack turns on a dime.
Jack turns on his former friends.
Jack turns on to life.
Jack turns on frequently.

We say in English that something which constituted of certain ingrediants is "made out of" those ingrediants.

We might also say "I can't make out what you're saying." Or "what I'm seeing."

And all though we don't make out cigarettes, we do put them out, which is close.

The question is, can "uitmaken" mean to kiss sloppily?

It also means "publish," "suggest," "let out [a pet] for the night," "irreparably damage [someone's eye with that thing]," "inconvenience," "offend," "have sex on a date," and so on.

It also means to disrobe.

But hey, this is a language which has a plural form of the number one, and that makes perfect sense to me; it's needful and the world will fall apart without it.

Either intense cynicism in coining a euphemism for killing, or interesting warning about how important it is to strive and seek and never give up: "he that is not busy being born is busy dying". Or, more bittersweetly, that the joy of achieving a goal is tempered with the sadness of no longer having a goal that's just within sight, and you've got to find a new goal to strive for.

Since it's French, I vote for cynicism.

Nicole, the etymology of the English verb "achieve" is given by the Random House/Webster 1999 as "1275–1325; ME acheven

That sounds familiar. I remember something similar in one of the Foundation books; a discussion among diplomats of the Foundation (first Foundation).

I think you could just about use it in the sense of "to matter" in northern England, although it would be a stretch.

German has some fantastic examples of this, especially verbs that are formed with a stammwort and a modifier. For example, handeln means "to act", but also "to trade", and the derived noun der Handel means "commerce", but its other derived noun die Handlung means action.

Verhandeln is "to negotiate", which is clear enough. But behandeln is "to treat" a disease or patient. eine Abhandlung is an account of events.

Or what about treten, "to tread" or "to kick"? Zertreten is to trample. Betreten is to walk over something, hence Betreten verboten! means keep off the grass. Ertreten would probably mean kick to death but I've never seen it in the wild.

But vertreten is "to represent", and zurücktreten is literally "to kick or step back" but actually means "to resign". And auftreten is to appear on stage.

The ver- prefix is weird; it means either that you got the verb wrong (sich verlaufen/verfahren - to get lost) or else that there is some sort of different metaphorical meaning, like verhandeln. Er- is to do the verb action to completion - erschießen is to shoot dead. Zer- is to do something to pieces; zerreißen, to tear to pieces, zerstören, to destroy, or literally to disturb (stören) to pieces.

Humph.

'achever quelqu'un' means to give someone who is severely wounded the 'coup de grâce' - an expression sometimes mispronounced in a way that would have a French-speaking person wonder why they're being told about the cost of fat.

Either intense cynicism in coining a euphemism for killing, or interesting warning about how important it is to strive and seek and never give up: "he that is not busy being born is busy dying".

Which reminds me of Cicero's announcement concerning the Catilinarian conspirators: Vixerunt = they have lived = they have been executed (on account of the perfect tense connoting a completed action in the past). To kill someone is in a sense to complete their life.

The efficere comment is spot on, I think, as are the comments about "put out". I also vaguely remember a piece of comic writing which pointed out that the English verb "to get" (with various prepositions) could replace every verb in the English language. No doubt someone can remind me or correct me.

You have essentially the same in Swedish (not really surprising, being the most German-, Frech- and English-influenced of the Nordic languages; no kicking though), only with "träda" instead of 'treten' (and a possible, stretched, pun about treeing or wooding things, though that would require having a sufficiently broken mind).

As for the "handeln" (sv: "handla"), you have the same thing

Robin: On Saturday I disinherited my only son.

Sir Roderic: But you haven't got a son.

Robin: No - not yet. I disinherited him in advance, to save time. You see - by this arrangement - he'll be born ready disinherited.

Sir Roderic: I see. But I don't think you can do that.

Robin: My good sir, if I can't disinherit my own unborn son, whose unborn son can I disinherit?

Sir Roderic: Humph! These arguments sound very well, but I can't help thinking that, if they were reduced to syllogistic form, they wouldn't hold water.

-- Ruddigore, Gilbert & Sullivan

And English slang has the phrase "to give sb the good news"... which certainly puts a new spin on a lot of Christmas carols.

I also vaguely remember a piece of comic writing which pointed out that the English verb "to get" (with various prepositions) could replace every verb in the English language.

Which reminds me of the classic Onion article, "National Funk Congress Deadlocked On Get Up/Get Down Issue"
(http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29205)
which seems to come from a similar universe to The Blues Brothers - in which there is a single street with a church run by James Brown, a music shop run by Ray Charles and a soul food restaurant run by Aretha Franklin.

Rousing finale, full of words and music, signifying nothing.

Xopher, 36: On my old blog some years ago, I discussed how the Bush administration based its foreign policy in Comic Opera Logic. It makes sense of a sort out of a lot of things.

Fortunately we have the word 'fireproof' for the purpose you have in mind.

Anything else is just a variation on a theme...

Whereas 'raise' versus 'raze' is more an aural confusion, but there are many people whose spelling is shaky — oh deer, we're in the raindeer/reigndeer (a rarer beast) season now — and it can be hard to tell what they mean quickly.

From your information, I assume older English had a very similar two to that too, and the spelling has settled as the same. This sort of thing is part of why I'm dubious how useful phonetic spelling wood bee.

ummm... [[is embarrassed, and slinks away to contemplate what led to that particular conclusion/confusion]]

I guess if the Dutch break up with people whenever they make out with them, it's no wonder that they got this whole reputation for promiscuity.

A language that boiks down to "nice", "really", "delicious" and "beautiful" can't be all bad. Though I would have found a way to work gezellig into that list.

Generally, but Martin will correct me:

One of my favorite word collisions in Dutch is voorkomen. With the accent on the first syllable, it means "to occur". With the accent on the second, it means "to prevent".

They are separate words grammatically. In Dutch, there is a large class of verbs called "separable verbs", where the prefix (pretty much always a preposition) gets cast adrift from the root verb in many contexts. They are marked by an emphasis on the prefix.

Thus:

Hij voorkomt een ongeluk. He prevents an accident.
De ongeluk komt in het centrum voor. The accident occurs in the city center.

But, ambiguously:

Ik wil het voorkomen. I want to prevent it, or I want it to occur. One distinguishes these two cases by accenting the vowels of the stressed syllable (vóókomen vs voorkómen).

And as long as I'm here: het ongeluk, not de ongeluk.

It does NOT, in fact, mean "right now"; it's meaning is closer to "eventually" - this has caused my (South African expat) father some difficulty over the years, especially with my stepmother. :)

German can also completely change the meaning of the verb according to whether or not it's reflexive. Sich verlaufen is to get lost (specifically, to get lost on foot); literally, that should be get *yourself* lost, which is arguably as it should be.

But if you drop the sich, verlaufen means "to run" as in "the front line runs along the river Hypothetical as far as Example".

As regards cleaving, I assume there are two separate Old English sources; one for cleave/cleft/cloven, and one for cleave as in together. German has die Kluft which is a cleft or gap, and the verb kleben which means "to stick" or "to glue".

Interestingly, the verb from Kluft, whatever it was, went out of use while kleben was preserved, exactly the opposite of the development of English. In terms of West Germanic linguistics, it doesn't seem at all surprising that one-and-a-half of the two survives in English and High German, but a different one in each, and both survive in Dutch. I bet the source is early medieval Low German.

Hmm, I wonder how Platt Deutsch deals with cleavers, clefts, cleaving and the cloven?

Another term which can cause similar trouble is 'later'. In the dialect of English I was brought up to speak, this normally meant 'later today'. (This probably varied a bit with context; it might sometimes mean 'later this week', etc. But if someone said 'I'll do it later' this would imply that it would be done within a specifiable period.) Nowadays, though, I often meet people who just use it to mean 'at some time in the future'.

stick together cleave: [OE. had two verbs; clífan str. (*cláf, pl. clifon, clifen), and clifian, cleofian weak (clifode, -od). (1) The former was a Com. Teut. strong vb....

split apart cleave: [Common Teut.: OE. clíofan, cléofan, pa. tense cléaf, pl. clufon, pa. pple. clofen...

Well, the Reimer Plautdietsch NT renders Matthew 19:5 (For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh) as "Doaromm woat en Maun sien Foda en siene Mutta felote, en woat sikj aun siene Fru hoole, en dee twee woare een Fleesch senne."

While I have friends for whom Plaut (Russian Mennonite, not the current German version if there is one) is their mother tongue, I do not speak it. I can't find an NT reference to cleave meaning split in English.

Relatedly, I've just learned that the Dutch for sysadmin is "systembeheerder", which gives a lovely image of someone watching over routers peacefully grazing.

Two words: server farms.

More generally:

I actually don't tend to think of separable verbs as separable verbs. I became fascinated early on with the way that Dutch uses prepositional prefixes to alter the meanings of verbs*. Having those prepositions wander off of the stem from time to time is just part of the fun.

Geven is to give. Aangeven is to report. Overgeven is either to give over or to throw up.

Sometimes you can work these things out by knowing the preposition and the verb. Othertimes it's just idiomatic and you have to learn it.

-----
* It uses other prefixes as well: her- means re-; ver- means something I can't translate but have a gut feel for.

Sich übergeben is "to vomit".

"Presently," which depending on when and by whom used, means either "now" or "later."

The present is one of those times when the word is too ambiguous for me to find it useful.

And again Dutch and German parallels Swedish.

"ge" is 'give', "ange" is 'to accuse', "överge" is 'abandon' and "ge" is the present form of "giva" (and "gift" means either 'poison' or 'married', but "gåva" means something that has been given).

Indeed. In Dutch gift means gift (as in: a present), or poison. gif also means poison. And then there's gave, which means gift (as in: a talent).

opgeven: to give up.
weggeven: to give away
etc.

This also occurs in North Germanic languages. The increasing influence of English is usually seen as the culprit.

Russian does this too. With generic verbs it can be less intuitive than with verbs of motion. With verbs of motion the nature of the prepositional prefix tells you what's happning (approaching, entering, passing by, going around/over/under/through, etc.).

With verbs which aren't of motion it gets more amusing, because addition of prefixes changes the temporal aspect (from imperfective to perfective). Somtimes this creates a need to make an imperfective aspect of a perfective concept (e.g., "to win" which is a perfective aspect of the verb, "to play". Since winning is a thing which did, or will, happen at a specific moment in time, it's perfective. But the state of winning, during play is ongoing (or fleeting) it can't be perfective. To correct this they add an, "in-fix". An extra-syllable gets put into the middle to move it out of the perfective aspect.

If one can get the hang of how Russian deals with time, all the rest is, almost, trivial.

There's also the separable/inseparable pair umfahren/umfahren. One means to drive round someone; the other to run them over.

Don't you have to be fairly riotous with the eggwhites to get a souffle? Somehow, it does seems related to me. I like it!

Each of these is its own individual word, and trying to see them as belonging to one general concept (justification? justice? ethics? rightness?) will lead to some pretty odd Hebrew.

except the numbers, I think...

Ilya was once asked how he would decline 1,572 in the instrumental.

After a brief cognitive pause he said, "I wouldn't."

He meant it too. He explained he would see it coming and recast the sentence to avoid the need (or include a каторый clause, and so reset the declension).

And every time I find myself staring some complex declension of a number, I curse myself for not seeing it coming in time to do that.

Indeed, Swedish is starting to see more and more "säskrivna" (apart-written) words, where normally they would be "sammanskrivna" (together-written). It is to the point that one occasionally sees "sär skriv(en/na)" to illustrate the point further (that being the apart-written form, as it were).

Of course, it doesn't help that there are compound nouns that come apart-written in their base forms (though, curciously, the only one that springs to mind is "varm korv" (lit: 'warm sausage', more commonly translated as 'hot dog').