floor 'ground'

[Benjamin Barrett]

They aren't the same word in Japanese. I have been corrected more than once on that score.

I checked Google Translate which agrees with me, correctly giving 地面 for ground and 床 for floor. The floor sentence for some reason caused Google Translate to go from a reasonable translation to a strange circumlocution. BB

On Sep 26, 2014, at 12:00 PM, W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> Just for fun, ran the following two sentences in Google translator for
> several of its languages:
> (1) The apple fell from the tree down to the **ground**.
> (2) The apple fell off the table down to the **floor**.
> 
> Only the ruddy Dutch do it just like us:
> (1) De appel viel van de boom tot aan de **grond**.
> (2) De appel viel van de tafel naar beneden naar de **vloer**.
> 
> Languages where Google says _ground_ & _floor_ are the same word:
> German Boden, Mandarin di-4, French le sol, Spanish suelo, Japanese,
> Korean, Portuguese cha~o, (Vietnamese, Thai, I think).
> 
> Different words for  _ground_ & _floor_:
> Other Germanic, Yiddish, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Esperanto.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org