Re: Do you want a French "little" or a Dutch "little"? :))

On Tue, 2002-06-04 at 00:42, John Cowan wrote:
> Christophe Grandsire scripsit:
>
> > [I]f a French cook asked me to put "a little" butter in a pan, I would put just
> > enough to make the pan slightly greasy, and I find that normal. On the other
> > hand, when Jan asks me to put "a little" butter in the pan, he expects me to
> > put about 50g of butter,
>
> For Anglo-Saxon cooks, that is about 3 1/2 tbsp, or just under half
> a stick.
A stick?

> Odd that you measure butter by mass, but we measure it by
> volume: 1 tbsp = 14.8 cm^3.
15 mL, I thought. I guess it's only 0.2 mL difference. And we've
probably metrified ours in Australia or something. We buy things like
butter and flour by mass but cook by volume.

> >  [T]he actual value of quantifiers depend on the
> > language (sometimes on the person who speaks it too, but the language
> > dependence is strong).
>
> Other examples:  Polish "orange" covers fewer shades than English "orange".
> Child "soon" is much sooner than adult "soon", at least in English.
The old saying, although the English wouldn't agree (assuming they even
know it), goes: To an Australian, 100 years is a long time. To an
Englishman, 100 km is a long distance. (It implies the reversed views
don't hold though, of course.) (I've also heard something similar with
America instead of Australia but I don't know if it still holds (is 100
year-old building really old?) and anyway, everyone knows a Dinkum
Aussie is a True Blue Aussie at heart.)

Tristan

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