a gap in the library

Latin ecce, Italian ecco, Russian vot, French voilà, Esperanto jen — the nearest English equivalent I can think of is lo!, which is not in most bilingual dictionaries, for the same reason English-speakers know the word voilà. So how do I look up such a word in my English-Spanish dictionary?

Comments are always open: can you add to (or correct) the list?

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2 Responses to a gap in the library

  1. Jim Henley says:

    What about “behold?”

  2. English uses a number of idiomatic constructions that other languages use single words for, but i have seen ‘Walla’ here. I am not a fan of the ladin languages, the latest read is cowley ‘words we’d weild if we won in 1066’. It is having some effect.

    For example, english ‘over and over’ comes in german ‘immer over’. English constructs a question tag by a negative inversion of the modal (they read the book, didn’t they), where german uses ‘doch’ and frech uses ‘si’.

    English does not use a dative(?) when constructing an opinion. “It seems that …. ” for “it seems me that …” German requires the dative.

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