Skip to content
EveryLingua

B2  ·  44 Wörter

At the restaurant, in more detail

Menu, order, bill — and what can go wrong.

Near the end of the list sits immangeable, and it is worth stopping on, because it is made in a way English cannot copy. French takes the plainest verb it has for eating, manger, adds -able to get mangeable, and negates the result with in-, which assimilates to im- before m, b and p. What comes out is transparent to every speaker, a child included: not able to be eaten. The same machine runs on any everyday verb — boire gives imbuvable, vivre gives invivable, faire gives infaisable, prononcer gives imprononçable. English owns both the prefix and the suffix, but it cannot put them on « eat ». The usual word is « inedible », and it sits on Latin edere, a verb that never arrived here on its own, so the word has to be learnt rather than worked out. « Uneatable » does exist, on the native stem, and it leans towards the sense this list needs: not unfit to eat by nature, simply too unpleasant to finish. That is what la sauce était franchement immangeable is saying.

Die Wörter

Diese Liste abfragen

Auswahl und Lücke, aus genau diesen 44 Wörtern. Was Sie falsch beantworten, kommt morgen wieder.