Re: [Lingo] verb-iru

["Niels Kobschaetzki" <n.kobschaetzki@example.com>]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Niels Kobschaetzki writes:
>
>  > You can't say まだ知っていませ？
>  > Didn't know that (and it seems that the iPhone-sentence completion
>  > didn't either ;))
>
> Nope.  As far as I know, you can't.  But then, in English you can't
> say "I am not knowing ..." OR "I am knowing ..."!  It's kind of
> strange to me that in Japanese it's 知っている for the positive, but
> 知らない for the negative.

Well - 知っている means that I am in the state of knowing, 知らない means that
I am not in the state of knowing and if I understand those ~ていない
correctly, 知っていない would mean that I am not yet in the state of knowing
but I am in the process to come to this state. So maybe you can use it
when someone asks you about a let's say theoretical model and maybe
you are half-way through the paper you could say 知っていない but I guess
that such a thing would be used with 分かる.
I guess the problem is that you either know a fact or don't know it
and that there isn't really a process to come the state of knowing -
if so only a process of understanding it and that would be solved via
分かる, wouldn't it?

>  > Sure a lot of people are translating [懐かしい as "nostalgic" or
>  > "familiar"] but I think that it is not really the same. I've never
>  > heard someone saying "aah, nostalgic" or "that's familiar". Sure,
>  > you can say that but still nobody does in the way people use "懐か
>  > しい". I often hear it in the form of an exclamation
>
> "Brings back memories/feelings/old times!"  "Oh, yeah, good old Joe!"
> "Wow, a blast from the past!"
>
> Sure, I agree that these expressions are not used so frequently as the
> Japanese use "natsukashii", but the emotional content as well as the
> information content is quite the same, I think.

That's true, those are good sentences to translate the exclamation
懐かしい. My point was that there isn't really one word you can translate
it to (because I've seen it only used in an exclamation), only
sentences that express the same feeling (an expression of emotion).
And that complex concepts like 民主主義 can be "directly" translated to a
word in English (in this case democracy) and that other words have 10+
possible translation in edict (or other dictionaries).

Niels