"love" in Duckburg
Nils Lid Hjort
nils at math.uio.no
Wed Dec 8 19:39:05 CET 1999
Yesterday I inquired about toilets in Duckburg,
today I'm shifting register and ask about "love".
In English and American usage this word is much
more frequent and ambiguous, and therefore less
weighty and less precise, and more context-dependent,
than in several other languages: Liebe, kjærlighet,
liobov', amour, agape, amor/ardor/flamma/amans...
In these other languages the corresponding word
typically means more and carries more weight and
temperature than in poor pedestrian English/American.
So I'd expect the word "love" to have appeared once
in a while in the Duckburg reports we read, perhaps
in contexts as "I'd love to ...", "how I'd love to ...",
"I love vanilla/icecream". Nevertheless I suspect (real)
love is a theme (like toilets) with which artists
and publishers would choose to avoid serious contact
in Disney comics (for several reasons).
I'm slowly converging towards my question du jour:
are there earlier instances in Disney comics where
"love" is explicitly used, in the "real" sense
(more weighty than loving soda (DD) or prunes (167-761?))?
Has the word "kjærlighet" ever appeared in DD's 50 year
history in Norway, for example? Or "Liebe" in the
German Mickey Mouse weekly?
One reason for being curious about this is that the
word _does_ (cleverly, relevantly and movingly) appear
in DD & Co. #50 next week. I'm also curious about how
other translators have solved the task -- the German
#1/2000 goes around it slightly differently, for example.
(I have lent out my Finnish Kalevala book to my Finnish-Estonian-
Vepsian-Ingermanian-East/West-Karelian-Votian-Livian
-Latvian-Mordvinian-reading friend and cannot check this spot now.)
So: 20 Norwegian crowns to the first person able to find
the word "kjærlighet" in any Disney Duckburg-universe
comics story prior to the next week issue.
Nils Lid Hjort
PS:
Stefan P: <<BTW, "runometer" is called "rune-o-meter" in English.>>
Stefan D (hesitantly): <<I'll take your word for it...>>
Don't -- this is such a rare word that when the occasion
raises its head one is allowed to (re)construct it for
its intended use. And scholars use both "runo" and "rune"
in this Finnish-Nordic context (from "runar", Old Norse).
And it's actually "metre" this side of the Atlantic.
I'd write runometre.
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