tchrist

155 reputation

bio	website	perl.com
	location	Boulder, CO
	age	50
visits	member for	1 year, 4 months
	seen	Apr 9 at 16:49
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I’m Tom Christiansen, author of Programming Perl and Perl Cookbook from O’Reilly. I’m a freelance instructor giving courses in Perl programming, including Unicode and regular expressions. I’ve been using BSD Unix for 30 years now; like your maid, I don’t do Windows.

I’ve undergraduate degrees in Spanish and in Computer Science, and a graduate degree in compsci focusing on operating systems design and in natural language processing. I’ve studied Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, and German, with a smattering of other languages thrown in. For the last few years I’ve been dabbling in computational linguistics.

	155 reputation	bio	website	perl.com	visits	member for	1 year, 4 months
5 badges		location	Boulder, CO		seen	Apr 9 at 16:49

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Mar 3	revised	Why is “voy” used in “voy perdiendo” instead of “estoy”? two tiny fixes that fit better for the intended colloquial register; added some further notes on translation
Mar 3	comment	Why is “voy” used in “voy perdiendo” instead of “estoy”? @Albertus Thanks, I really like the Spanish progressives. Often a progressive in one language does not neceesarily mean a progressive in the other, and this goes both ways. I’ve added a note at the bottom illustrating this.
Mar 3	suggested	suggested edit on Why is “voy” used in “voy perdiendo” instead of “estoy”?
Mar 2	awarded	Editor
Mar 2	revised	Why is “voy” used in “voy perdiendo” instead of “estoy”? added loose translation into English
Mar 2	comment	How can you translate the word “whatsoever” to spanish? Try a postfix alguno.
Mar 2	comment	How can you translate the word “whatsoever” to spanish? No hay justificación alguna para eso.
Mar 2	comment	Why is “voy” used in “voy perdiendo” instead of “estoy”? @JoulSauron I’ve taken at a crack at the translation; I think this is a great answer.
Mar 2	suggested	suggested edit on Why is “voy” used in “voy perdiendo” instead of “estoy”?
Jul 29	comment	Do mi and mío have different connotations? @JoulSauron Yes, that sounds more natural. I was just trying to explain to Luke the general difference between “mi cosa” and “cosa mía”, for arbitrary cosas. :) I wouldn’t consider “mi amigo” interchangeable with “amigo mío” either, although the difference isn’t easily translated into English.
Jul 29	comment	Do mi and mío have different connotations? @JoulSauron Pretty only the sort of thing that would be as a response to somebody else first saying “Ésta es mi casa,” because you’re trying to contrast with theirs. It’s when in English you would say “And this one is my house” (as opposed to that other one being theirs). Or if you were translating "this house of mine".
Jul 28	comment	Do mi and mío have different connotations? @luke It’s super-duper more common to say “Ésta as mi casa”, but there is room for saying “Ésta es casa mía” (without the la, however). See my answer for the difference between mi casa and casa mía.
Jul 28	answered	Do mi and mío have different connotations?
Jul 26	comment	How did “asistir” and “atender” become opposite of their cognates in english? Por favor, deberías explicar exactamente cómo una putativa influencia germánica puede haber cambiado el sentido in las versiones inglesas respecto a las castallanas, pues que no queda nada claro. Dado que vienen al inglés a través del francés y de ahí el latín, no veo como entra lo germánico en todo esto.
Jul 26	comment	How to say something is “annoying” in Spanish? Hm, mosquear comes to mind, given your example. :)
Jun 4	comment	Spanish for “douche”? Can you give any insight on what sorts of Spanish insults might be more apt to be heard out of the mouths of children (including teens) than adults? I imagine this must be very regional, but is still interesting.
Jun 4	comment	Spanish for “douche”? Children’s slang like this varies too much not just from country to country but from one playgroup to the next for a definitive answer to be possible. I’d laugh if I heard an adult using douche as an insult. I don’t know a term in Spanish that carries the same little-kid feel to it.
Jun 4	comment	Correct usage of debieras and deberías In this case, I’d translate textos antiguos into old texts or perhaps older texts. “Ancient” texts would almost be something you expect to find on papyrus rolls. :)
May 31	comment	How do I ask someone not to call me “usted”? Spain doesn’t use vos as a formal kind of tú. Spain uses usted for formal singular. Yes, there is an archaic way of speaking that uses vos, but it sounds like someone using “dost thou wish thy own?” kinda arcaicism. Perhaps if you were super-formally addressing the king or some such.
May 29	comment	How to decide between “ahora” and “ya” for the sense “now”? @hippietrail The Mexicans like to use “ahorita” for “ahora mismo”.