I’m doing my Spanish homework and “Salen con” means “leaving with”, which can be used to say someone is dating someone (going out with someone). Since there’s nothing that intones dating within those words, how do English speakers and Spanish speakers use the same terminology when the words are used as a kind of euphemism?
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I’m counting that as a “saying” just because it’s a phrase that means something different than what the words explicitly describe.
Languages are related. English is said to have Germanic roots, as our sentence structure and other rules are very German, but about 60% of our word come from Latin and French (and French derrived from Latin, as well as Spanish). So English words, and Spanish words often have the same roots, even if it may not seem obvous)
For example, Salir means ‘to leave’ in Spanish It comes from the Latin word salire, which means ‘to jump. There is also the world ‘Saltus’ which means to leap. If I was to jump out and attack you, we would call that assault. It doesn’t seem related to ‘Salir’, but it is.
The word assault is done by combining the Latin word ‘to’ and ‘leap’. Or Ad+Saltus. Overtime it became the word assault. That is just one example of how Latin and English are related. No language is created in complete isolation. ideas travel, and words travel between languages. Over thousands of years multiple languages can settle on similar ways of expression.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “cross language barriers” I think you mean how is it translated?
A good translator will know what each saying means. And will know which sayings can be translated somewhat directly, and which ones need to be reworded extensively to make sense in their target language.
Generally speaking, almost nothing can be directed translated directly from one language to another without having to work shop it at least a little bit. For example, English and German are very closely related. To the point that an English speaker could read German and recognize quite a lot of words. But at the same time, the word order for each is so different that almost everything that gets translated will have to be reworded to actually make grammatical sense in the target language.
In this case the saying isn’t really an unrelated idiom. Leaving with the person you’re in a relationship with is a perfectly normal thing to do, and the same phrase exists even in very distant languages (e.g. Japanese *tsukiau*, lit. “to go somewhere with someone, keep someone company” but idiomatically “to date, be in a relationship with”).
“Salir” literally means “going out” as well as the definition of “leave.” “Going out” can refer to dating in multiple languages because when you’re dating someone, you usually go out on dates. I don’t really see how it’s particularly euphemistic.
> Since there’s nothing that intones dating within those words, how do English speakers and Spanish speakers use the same terminology when the words are used as a kind of euphemism?
There’s a couple reasons this can happen. One, similar semantic extensions – ‘go off to some place with’ => ‘go on a date with’ seems pretty intuitive. Two, sometimes people can simply directly translate expressions, and then the translation becomes the way that’s said in the new language – see e.g. how many languages have something like ‘thing that touches the sky’ for English *skyscraper*. The first of these has no specific term; the second is called *calquing*.
There are two main ways this can happen. First is through shared language ancestry—some languages evolved from the same base language, so they share the same basic structure and root words, like how siblings might look alike, even though they’re clearly different people. For example, the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, etc) all evolved from Latin, and are considered quite similar. English is a sort of half-sibling—it was originally Germanic but was heavily influenced by French, leading it to be a mix of the two, with some very Germanic features and terms, and some very Romantic ones.
The other way sayings can cross language barriers is by people who learn both bringing over sayings or phrasings from their own language. For example, “Long time no see” is now considered a pretty normal (if colloquial) English greeting, but it’s actually a word-for-word translation of a Chinese greeting (or Native American; the etymology is a bit disputed). While a more natural translation would be “I haven’t seen you in a long time,” someone who’s just learning the language might not be able to word it so naturally, but can still make their meaning clear. Over time, some of these phrases, sayings, and patterns might make their way into the language as a whole.
Finally, some words are simply borrowed from others. Japanese is a master of this—they’ll take words from other languages and transliterate them into their phonetic scheme. They even have a specific alphabet used for such (katakana). Some fun examples of that are *pan* (“bread”, from Portuguese “pan”), *baito* (“part-time job”, from German *arbeit*, “work”), *anketo*, (“quiz”, from French *enquete*), and of course *konpyuutaa* (“computer”, from English). I’m sure you can think of plenty of English loanwords, but some might surprise you: concierge, anonymous, and zombie, to name a few.
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