Mr. Shumway and Pedro: Interesting.

Pedro Martínez: The explanation you provided supports what that link Marfitalu gave us and the book I have. So I guess it's all clear now what the difference really is.

English is full of words that are different in English, but in Farsi we use the same, or almost the same words for them.

Trip, Travel, Journy, Voyage, Excursion are a few such words.

I know how voyage is different from others, it's a trip by sea, but the rest are quite similar.

Take these examples:

1) My ... to work took more than 2 hours this morning.
2) For our holidays next year, we're going on a ten-day ... to Australia.

3) We always go on a day ... to France in December to buy Christmas presents.

4) The price of this holiday includes a full-day ... to a place of cultural interest.

5) He's hoping to go on a(n) ... to the Himalayas next year.

رضا: my 'feeling' tells me

• trip : short distance
  
• travel : the act itself, or when the trip is still busy
  
• voyage : longer time
  
• journy (journey?) : about the same as voyage, i think voyage is an older word and not used much anymore ?
  
• excursion : you have something of interest to watch during the trip/voyage
  

Hrqls: Well, I'm almost certain about the voyage one. It's a trip or journey by sea. Water should be involved somehow.

Let's wait for our native friends to give us a hand with it.

By the way, how do you make those black dots?

رضا: could be .. i never used the word .. but that doesnt mean anything :)

to create a list (the black dots) you can do the following

you define place [ul] and [/ul] around the list
each list item has [li] in front of it
(after each list item you can place [/li] but it isnt really needed)

so a list of animales would be
[ul]
[li]dog
[li]cat
[li]horse
[/ul]

• dog
  
• cat
  
• horse
  

(replace the [] by <> to make it work for real :))

Pedro Martínez: Just out of curiosity Pedro, does this krokodýli hav eanything to do with crocodiles?

رضا: This kind of question can be most easily answered by the native speakers. I would say that:
Trip is interchangeable with journey, voyage is a journey to some very distant place taking lots of time, travel is the act of travelling - it's more general term encompassing the other four, and excursion is a short journey.

Hrqls: Thanks for the dot explanation :-)

• I
  
• you
  
• he
  

رضا: "Mají doma krokodýly" means "They've got crocodiles at home". :)

Haha! It worked

Pedro Martínez: It's interesting how languages, especially European ones, have similar words.

رضا:
(ul = unordered list)
(li = list item)
(ol = ordered list, but i dont think fencer allows that one)

رضا: Yes, I think it's fascinating.

Hrqls: I was gonna ask you if you knew what they stand for, and you gave it to me yourself!

They are easier to memorize if I know what they stand for.

Thanks.

رضا: *nod* i always make the mistake of using ul and il or lu and li .. the names make it easier to remember to use the correct syntax :)

JDU DOMU - PEKNEJ VIKEND PREJU

Could someone please translate this?? It is Czech.

Crissie: "I'm off to home - have a nice weekend. :)

Pedro Martínez: Oh thanks!!

What about TAKY TAKY ???

Crissie: You're welcome.
"Taky taky" means "same here" or "the same to you".:)

Pedro Martínez: Thank you again. Hey at this rate, I'm going to at least learn how to type Czech.

Hrqls: There's just two articles in English that I know of. An indefinite one and a definite one.

"a" and "the". I have the hardest time figuring out why so many of the other European languages have all them articles and genders. I suppose when you grow up speaking German you just learn the article with the noun, but in English you just learn the noun. Der, die, das, den, and dem. They all mean "the". English has one thing that is easier to learn, now if we could just figure out how to spell English.

Walter Montego: Farsi has only one article too. And it's a definite article. However, unlike English, it's added to the end of a noun instead of the beginning of it.

Walter, Do you have any explanation regarding Trip, Travel, Journey, Voyage, Excursion?

What would you fill each of these blanks with?

• 1) My ... to work took more than 2 hours this morning.
  
• 2) For our holidays next year, we're going on a ten-day ... to Australia.
  
  
• 3) We always go on a day ... to France in December to buy Christmas presents.
  
  
• 4) The price of this holiday includes a full-day ... to a place of cultural interest.
  
  
• 5) He's hoping to go on a(n) ... to the Himalayas next year.
  

Walter Montego: The Germans actually don't learn the articles with the nouns. They learn the usage of the correct ones from how their parents and other people around them talk to them and later in life, they don't even think of most of articles and suffixes connected with them since they seem to be obvious.

Pedro Martínez: I agree. Just like the English people never think on using He or She but I have to mak eup my mind if it's a He I'm talking baout or a She. In Farsi thre's no gender-related pronoun. So basically be you a man or a woman, you're always تو and He or She are both او .

رضا: I'd use:

1) journey
2) trip
3) trip
4) outing
5) journey

My choices are:

1)journey
2)trip
3)trip or maybe even tour?
4)excursion
5)trip

رضا:
1) trip
2) excursion
3) trip
4) excursion
5) excursion (short time), holiday (longer time), journey (longest time, i think)

Pedro Martínez: with short notes we always leave out the articles and person-pointers (he/she/..) .. often in speech as well, or the articles are spoken so fast (and almost swallowed) that they are hard to notice

Hrqls: Is there only one case in Dutch? I'm not sure now, but I think so. Well, it's easier to swallow het and de than einem, einer, etc...:))

Pedro Martínez: when speaking loosely we often just say "n" - and that fits for female, male and neutral :)

Mr. Shumway: But you say something like "mit n'm schönen Hai" for instance...the case is almost always evident.

رضا: You guys obviously aren't from Southern California and the land of freeways, cars, and traffic! :)
It's a trip to work. There are statistics that call them trips or cartrips.

Going to work can be a journey or a voyage or often times an adventure. It is quite common for people to drive over 50 miles one way to get to work. I used to work in downtown Los Angeles and it is 34 miles one way from here. "Good morning commuters, there's big rig jackknifed on the 405 at Imperial and it's caused a Sigalert, you'd better use an alternate route. Let's talk to Jeff in the 'copter over the six car pile up at the 605 and 91." And when it rains around here, it's a real mess. Good thing it doesn't snow. At least twenty radio stations will broadcast traffic conditions throughout the day. Two of them, KNX 1070 and KFW 980, do it every six to ten minutes. We have a lot of television stations do it too.

Drive is the other word that would be used.

For sentence 1, I'd use "trip" from your list, but it'd be common to hear "drive" or "commute" around here.

For sentence 2, I'd use "trip" from your list. Vacation would be common and if by ship you'd hear cruise. Canadians use the word "holiday" as Americans use the word "vacation."

Because of the word "day" in front of your blank in sentence 3, about the only word I would use is "trip." A day trip is a common expression for a trip that has you returning to the starting point the same day. It's said of hiking too.

For sentence 4 from your list, "excursion" might be used. I wouldn't use outing for part of a paid and organized trip. Outing to me is something spontaneous that a family might do, like jump in the car and just head off until something comes up or maybe just head to the beach to spend the day and walk around. I've seen another word for this in travel brochures, but it escapes me right now. It could also be called a "side trip", but I doubt if they'd word it that way in an advertisement. "Tour" is the word I'm thinking of. A full day tour or guided tour.

Sentence 5. Trip or journey seem OK to me. Journey usually implies having to make extra effort to get to somewhere, and the Himalayas qualify.
_________ _________ __________ _________ _______

Voyage doesn't have to be by ship or even a trip to anywhere. It is sometimes said when one is going through life that you're on a voyage. Or a voyage of time. It can also be used for a land crossing, but it's not a very commonly used word. It is as you say much more common for use with travelling by water, but also some type of conveyance. So a train trip could be a voyage across a continent or said of a covered wagon from the pioneer days to cross the continent.

Excursion is not word too many people use. Now that Ford has made this giant SUV and named it the "Excursion" I only hear it when someone is talking about those. The word has a thrusting connotation to it to me and I think of military terminology when I hear it. I suppose it can used to describe some types of trips or vacations.

Pedro Martínez: I heard the Japanese does not have articles at all.

Walter Montego: Thanks for your post. Especially for the remark concerning 'outing'. Another piece of knowledge to my puzzle.

I know nothing about Japanese so I can't confirm that, but it may well be true...:)

Pedro Martínez: Yes, that's true! Even the almost absent article is inflected - crazy ;) And I made a mistake: for female nouns we don't say "n" but "ne", so only male and neutral are the same. And that just because the original words are both "ein". So I propably have to take back my whole post ;)

Pedro Martínez: yes, only 1 case .. but we had mores cases (i think similar to german, or maybe 1 less, german has 5 cases isnt it ? or is that ancient greek and ancient latin has 4 ? i am always confused :))

ancient greek didnt have articles i think .. its been 10 years since i had it though, and we were only taught to translate ancient greek readings to dutch

Hrqls: german has 4 and ancient latin 5, they had the ablative!

Mr. Shumway: It can be hard to distinguish masculine and neutral gender in 2nd and 3rd case. So not the whole post, just a part of it...:)

Hrqls: It's as Mr. Shumway said. BTW, what do you mean that you had more cases? You mean some earlier form of Dutch?

By the way, there are 7 cases in Czech.:)

Pedro Martínez: Wow! Would be nice to know more about it :)

Walter Montego: Thanks for the post. So I take it the use of these words is related to the distance one is going or what?

If it's related to the distance, then how ould you arrange them from the shortest to the longest?

excursion trip journey voyage ?

But you also mentioned that journey has some sort of difficulty in it. So that's a good point to have in mind.


*************************************

Hrqls: Learning Greek would be logical to me, but what would you need ancient Greek for?

Pedro Martínez: 7 cases of what?

رضا: 7 cases of nouns.

Fencer: What does it mean you have seven cases of nouns?

رضا: In English, there is only one case. All the nouns are written and pronounced in the same way no matter where it is in a sentence or what kind of preposition precedes it. However, in a lot of languages, nouns do change (or their articles). In Czech, each noun (and also adjective, pronoun and numeral) has seven forms. Anybody who studies Czech as a foreign language should learn all these forms and remember which suffix goes with which case. For instance if you want to say "by bus", you should know that this is a 7th case and the suffix is -em ("autobusem"). Accordingly, "without anything" is a 2nd case and the suffix is -ho ("bez ničeho"). I hope it makes some sense. :)

Pedro Martínez: It does make sense, but I'm glad they don't make us learn Czeck in university :-)

I have another problem with choice of vocabulary. What is the difference between these words?

banned, prohibited, forbidden, prevented, disallowed, unpermitted

take these examples:

1) He was found guilty of dangerous driving and ... from driving for three years.

2) Smoking is strictly ... on underground trains in London

3) Because he got home two hours late, he was ... to go out for a week.

4) Relatives were not ... to viist patients at any time other than weekday afternoons between five and six.

Hi! Great board!

here is my attempt to explain...


banned....to legally take away a right

prohibited...to forbid by authority

forbidden....to command someone not to do something

prevented.....to stop something from happening (usually to stop something bad from happening)

disallowed.....to not allow something

unpermitted....never heard of this!! we say 'not permitted' and that is similar to disallow


1. banned
2. prohibited
3. not permitted
4. permitted

رضا: why would someone learn ancient latin ? why would someone learn ancient greek ?

the only real reason i can think of would be to study ancient texts in their original language

as i am not linguist, and never will be one, my skills are more in the mathematical field, i will never translate any ancient texts .... but i did have some benefits from learning to read ancient greek and ancient latin .. it made it easier for me to understand other foreign languages. i never learned any italian or spanish, but having had ancient latin i can roughly read spanish and italian news papers. i never found a language which made me think of ancient greek .. but maybe i might have some use for it when i visit greece? .. at least it helped me during my physics study because i know the names for the symbols used to the angles .. other students always used the wrong names .. lots of fun :)

other than that i have no real use for having had those languages in school .. but since i went to a 'gymnasium-only' school i had to have both language and have exam in at least one of them (i chose ancient greek as those texts were more interesting, and the language seems more fun, and because we just had the gerundivum (i think?) with ancient latin just before we had to chose which we would do exam in .. so i dropped latin as i didnt like that special case ;))