Hello all,
Nicole wrote:As does Roy and Reine, but somehow the King and Queen do not have the same connotation for me ... When I think of Roy and Reine it takes me back to the fairy tale world you mentioned. When I think King and Queen it becomes more based in history and not anywhere as romantic... it may be just as simple as being in different language for me, but I don't think so..
I may be missing something here, but in order for ‘Roi’ to mean something different from ‘King’ these words would have to elicit different
semantic memories in us. This would only be possible if a person has access to both words because he or she speaks both languages, in which case this person may have attached several different
experiential memories to each word. This could make each noun feel different at subjective level. For example, the word Queen could bring Elizabeth to mind, while Reina would bring Isabel de Castilla up. But these experiential memories could be a lot more complex: in the mind of someone the word ‘Royne’ could elicit a certain nostalgic mood the person experienced while walking through Versailles the day after breaking up with her boyfriend; while for the same person the world ‘Queen’ could evoke the image of a half-filed bathtub in WWII. Still, I would see this as something that enriches the semantic field of these words, and only for that person, not as something that elicits completely different images from one word to the other one, since both Isabel de Castilla and Elizabeth exist within the same semantic category.
At an objective level, or from the perspective of a person who speaks only one of these languages and has no way of envisioning both words simultaneously, ‘King’ or ‘Rey’ are just the nouns that person has to represent a very specific figure. ‘King’ translates into ‘Rey’ and ‘Rey’ translates into ‘King’. This is not different from saying ‘president’ or ‘presidente’, ‘house’ or ‘casa’, ‘horse’ or ‘caballo’, etc.
Best,
EE