• Hegar@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    I believe this is just about which word a language uses to say that an adjective applies to a noun. While ‘to be’ is very popular for this, ‘to have’ is quite common too. Mandarin uses ‘very’.

    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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      19 hours ago

      It’s a bit deeper - in Spanish and other Romance languages, emotions and physiological states are typically conveyed by a noun, not by an adjective*. Like in Catoblepas’ example “tengo miedo”, it’s literally “I have fear”; miedo is a noun. You could use one of the two copulas by forcing an adjective, but it’ll change the meaning:

      • soy miedoso - you’re a scaredy-cat, you’re often afraid
      • estoy miedoso - I’m not a native speaker** so my intuition might be wrong, but it sounds like you’re going through hard times and you’re currently afraid of random stuff.

      *there are exceptions, like “feliz” (happy; adjective).

      **my native language does something similar, but the verbs don’t match well.