止まる context sentence (LVL3)

Have you tried it with tamots? I was quite excited about learning a new word (english is my second language but I don’t learn a lot of new words anymore). The only thing I could find was actually the WK lesson. Of course I use tamots every possible occasion nowadays. I have tamots growing in my greenhouse!

tamots are localised to the WK office!

The funny thing is: we all understand what “my heart leapt into my mouth” actually means. Check it out here:

image

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eGoooott.

Interestingly, “Tamotsu” is a male given name in Japanese…

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I think actually the problem with this sentence is the “I thought” part. You can “think your heart stopped”, since that is something that could actually happen to bodies, even though it is still a, I want to say metaphor? But “heart leapt into my mouth” is more a feeling thing, since it is physically impossible anyway. “I felt my heart leap into my mouth/throat.” seems a better translation, even though the Japanese uses と思った. Does this make sense to you natives out there?

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Oh, the “I thought” is problematic in the way that it kinda takes it out of metaphor and suggest someone thought it happened to them, instead of somebody feeling like it happened (which being a feeling, as you noted, makes it entirely possible).

And I will acknowledge that I have probably read “my heart leapt into my mouth” in a book sometime (or I have now read it so many times in the last 24 hours that it has stopped sounding so alien), although I would still say that it is more common to see it with throat rather than mouth.

It is almost interesting to me how the actual translation sounds almost like it was written by someone whose first language wasn’t English, but then whenever I try to translate something that happens to me in whichever language I translate to and from. Translation is hard.

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Yeah, my Japanese teacher is a translator, and his advice for important translations is, do a rough translation, come back to it a couple days later, and rewrite your draft. I think it is so that the original is not at the forefront anymore, and you can just focus on making it sound natural in the target language. And a good translation sounds like an original.

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Ah yeah, like the drill killer in that brilliant detective anime.

Now that you mention it, that’s indeed what makes it sound strange. “My heart leapt into my mouth” sounds OK and so does “I thought my heart stopped”.

I’m sure there must be a name for doing this on purpose: some kind of figure of speech that puts two expressions in one.

We do this for sure in french for a laugh. A common one translates roughly as “I’m getting tons of golden cash”.

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Contamination, I think. Or it’s false friends with the Dutch expression.

Edit: yep, not used in all the same ways as in Dutch:

English: Blend word

Can’t find it. Am getting curious now! And polluting this poor thread! Or… rather… contaminating it…

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I edited my post with more information.

No wait, this just talks about regular portmanteaus, even though it linked from a page about actual mixing of idioms in Dutch. I need to look into this a bit more. Probably the podcast A Way With Words mentioned it at some point, but I think it would take too long to listen to all the episodes!

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Bwaaahhaaahahhaa! A podcast about portmanteau sounds quite narcissistic! But you’re quite close. It’s a bit like a portmanteau combining phrases from a sentence rather than syllables from a word.

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It’s actually about quirks of the English language, and people calling in with their language questions. But portmanteaus definitely come up! What is so narcissistic about portmanteaus?

A podcast is a portmanteau so it would be a show about itself… Far fetched maybe?! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Oh hahahahja so meta!

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I think the English word is “mixed metaphors”?

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