On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 01:56:55PM +0200, David Fokkema wrote: > On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 11:25:00AM +0200, Stephan Seitz wrote: > > Shade and sweet water! > > I was going to argue that this is an incorrect translation and should've > been 'shade and fresh water', but, apparantly, this is wrong. Wendy > herself has said 'shade and sweet water'. Why? Is there some sort of > english subtlety I miss here? Why is water sweet? > > I am from the Netherlands, where they say: 'schaduw en zoet water', > where 'zoet' means 'sweet', but 'zoet water', as opposed to 'zout > water', means 'fresh water' as opposed to 'salt (sea) water'. 'Sweet' has a more general meaning of 'good' with a sense of 'comforting' or 'deeply satisfying', as well as the specific meaning of 'tastes like sugar'. There are places in America called Sweet Water where hot, thirsty and tired pioneers on the trail got to a river and made good use of it, or something. From your 2nd para, it sounds like the Dutch use is pretty similar, which isn't too surprising as it's obviously the same word spelt a bit different. Do you mean that you always say 'zoet water', and don't say '<Dutch word for 'fresh'> water'? -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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