"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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