Comment by exidy

14 days ago

English is unusual in that we have both Germanic "weld" and Latinate "solder" and they've acquired different meanings. Spanish (and other Romance languages) use the term "solder" (soldado) for both.

9 comments

exidy

Reply
duskwuff  14 days ago

As an aside: Chinese also uses the same term for both (焊接), and the standard English translation is "welding". This can lead to some confusion when Chinese manufacturers start talking about e.g. "surface-mount welding". :)

  • jacquesm  14 days ago

    Heh, that would be a funny misunderstanding to have as well as the opposite, when you get back something soldered when you expected it to be welded.

jacquesm  14 days ago

Interesting. In dutch we use 'solderen' vs 'lassen', in German they use 'schweizen' and 'loten'.

English has a third term like that as well called 'brazing', then there is silver solder (a high temperature version of soldering), in dutch we'd call that 'hardsolderen', whereas what the English call brazing we call oxy-acetyleen lassen (which is more of a process name by virtue of naming the ingredients).

Soldadura autogeno and Soldadura en el arco (sp?) are what I think the modifiers used in Spanish to indicate brazing and (arc) welding.

  • myrion  14 days ago

    Schweissen und löten. Has nothing to do with Switzerland (Schweiz) ;)

    • usr1106  13 days ago

      As a matter of fact schweissen is only correct spelling in Switzerland.

      In Germany it would be schweißen.

    • jacquesm  13 days ago

      Ah yes, you are right! I was going by ear, rather than by the written version, in fact I can't recall seeing it written. German is a language that I will happily use but don't ask me to write a letter in it, you'll probably need exponential notation to represent the number of errors.

yread  13 days ago

Czech uses "Pájení" (derived from "joining") vs "Svařování" (derived from "boiling".

So, also different with different etymology in a language from a different group (although these things were probably influenced by German)

  • m4rtink  13 days ago

    Yeah - the Czech wording is quite clever:

    * the first one makes it clear a something (a different material) is used to join things together

    * the second one implies you melt/boil the things to join them together