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- "A könyvek az asztalon szörny…
10 Comments
541
Google Translate offers "badger apple" as a translation of "borszalmás". No idea what a badger apple is, though. If you leave out the accent on the "a", it'll give you "horrid" et cetera.
891
Borzalmas, with just a 'z'. Google Translate is fun. If you feed it a word that doesn't actually exist, it makes its best guess for a translation, based on what it knows about the language.
Borz means "badger", alma means "apple", and the '-s' suffix makes it into an adjective. So borzalmás would be the adjective form of "badger apple".
That makes me wonder if borzalmas actually derives from borz. The grammar would work out.
After a bit of research, they apparently aren't. Borz is of Turkic origin, and borzad, the base word of borzalmas, developed from ... an onomatopoeia? Neat. But the similarity is striking.
891
My first instinct is "poorly written", but it can also refer to the content. Bad condition would rather use rossz.
279
The books on the table are dreadful - I would have thought dreadful would be an equally acceptable option.
541
It's just that it is not among the limited set of synonyms supported by this application. You get to recognise which words they use in the application. This also serves to separate the learners from the users of online translation applications (not that I'm entirely innocent of such crimes).