If this is promptly obliterated by a
filtering system such as those ofWorkword, begun around 1987, is a collection of words and phrases in français, English, español, italiano, Deutsch and other languages, of interest to those taking part in international voluntary work-camps. We found that acquisition of language degrees, while these may impress prospective employers, had not given us any great ability to communicate with each other, particularly in everyday personal interaction and about commonplace objects and actions in a situation which must be typical of our first, and sometimes only, contacts with a real foreign language.
Assembly of the compendium is ongoing. Contributions and comments are always welcome, especially from those attending voluntary projects away from home. The nature and sequence of the entries are intended to associate the names of objects, actions and attitudes by their real-world relationship; the manner by which we keep them in our conscience, rather than by alphabetical sequence or grammatical function.
Freslang puts the above into a more decorative framed screen with further information.
Workword.txt is the ASCII file from which the above results. (It will possibly come out right if copied direct, and used in a non-Windows® word-processor.)
Verbabbs is a growing list of British composite verbs.
In the pipeline / on the stocks, is a compendium of over 29,500 phrases in French, English, Spanish and Italian, which do not lend themselves to arrangement within a dictionary and are not in the language one is taught in most countries for examination purposes. They are however, of very common usage. They have been gathered from personal contact, radio interviews, mail-order catalogues, motor maintenance manuals etc. Often it has been the case that the sense has been recognised in two or three languages, but not in the others. There are therefore many holes to fill in, and your help would be appreciated with phrases of which the equivalent in another language is needed. Examples are listed within :-
No word or phrase has an exact equivalent in any other language. Even communities within the same locality differ in their expression of thoughts and their interpretation of statements.
Within the range of any quality; size, cost, attractiveness, repute, etc, the grades represented by a specific word vary in number and significance among languages. Materials and objects have labels unmatched in other languages, and among people of different trades. In the North there are many words for which the Southerner has only the word "snow", while the Southerner and the mason have many words for what a Northerner would call "sand".
The label placed on an object such as a container, may have been derived from its shape, its function, its material, the components of its material, the method of its construction, the name of its first major manufacturer or user, or even a misunderstanding of the nomenclature of another language. A tin-plated steel canister is in England called a tin, and in America a can. In another language it is a box. A grocer or purchaser may refer to one as the "beans".
For these reasons, it is probable that the relationship among many phrases within the compendium are restricted in their applicability. The compiler would like to communicate with other parties; engineers, farmers, shorthand typists, long-distance lorry drivers, interested in promoting effective communication, and of international understanding, for the purpose of filling existing gaps and as far as possible, arranging that the context of each phrase or locution, inhibits misunderstanding. It should be noted that translation dictionaries among others, often incorporate the misprints and misinterpretations of earlier works, much of the content of which was somewhat dated when these older editions were published.