Anyone speak Spanish ?

[venta]

I've just had an enquiry from my mother: someone in her office needs to know the meaning of the Spanish word "paqueña". Any ideas ?

I've tried a couple of on-line dictionaries, but they don't contain it. I don't know whether this means they're rubbish, the word is colloquial, or the word is jut plain wrong.

Thanks for any help.

Update: Thanks to a non-LJ source of help, I can now reveal that a Paqueña is a lady from La Paz. A Paqueño is a gentleman from that city.

Update2: And having ferried the information back, via the mother, to the original enquirer... it turns out that yes, they did want to know what "pequeña" meant, but typo'd when asking.

Comments

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

They don't by any chance mean pequeña (small), do they?

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

I was wondering that; "paquena" (dunno how to do the squiggle) looks wrong, somehow!

[venta.livejournal.com]

If you're curious, ñ = Alt-0241.

(Longer patronising version: hit the Num Lock key on your keyboard, and then hold down the Alt key while typing 0241 on the numbered keypad on the right (not the numbers above the QWERTY row).)

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Short cheating version: Copy and paste is your friend ;-)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Or ñ

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oooh, does that work like that ? I never knew that. Thanks.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

In HTML (and thus livejournal) &#N; represents unicode character N, for decimal N. (Also &#xH; for hexadecimal H, which is handy since many code charts prefer hex.) This is true regardless of the character encoding used to transfer the document.

Unicode characters 0-127 and 160-255 match the familiar ISO-8859-1/Windows-1252 values that you're (presumably) getting with that keyboard rune (which is probably somewhat OS-specific). I think 128-159 match ISO-8859-1 (they certainly don't match windows-1252) but since they're all control characters it's not a very interesting question.

Unicode.org has a full set of code charts.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Aargh aargh aargh.

In HTML, ñ is ñ. W3C publish a complete list, which is also the first hit on Google for "html character entity".

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Why the arghs? ñ is perfectly valid in HTML, and indeed is exactly what ñ expands to. The entity list is all very well but doesn't cover all the characters you can use in HTML. Why bother going to the entity list first when it might not even have the answer?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Readability. I'd also suggest memorability, since I find it much easier to remember the entity names for accents than I find it to remember the ISO codes for all the permutations.

It's not really "aargh aargh", because nobody gives a stuff about the maintainability of LJ posts. So I'm not really complaining, just offering an alternative that some will prefer.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, apparently someone in my mum's office has just suggested that.

A dictionary I checked gives small as "pequeño" - would the last letter maybe change with gender ?

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Yes, the o ending is for male nouns, the a for female ones.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Yes, adjectives agree with their nouns, so a masculine small thing is pequeno and a feminine small thing is pequena.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I've never learned any Spanish at all, so was completely in the dark!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I don't speak Spanish myself, but I note that "paqueña niña" is used (online) in contexts where it ought to mean "little girl" so possibly the "La Paz" translation is too literal ?

Compare with the French "poupette", which technically means a kind of doll but in colloquial French is regularly aimed at babies and young children.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

"Pequeña niña" literally translates as "little girl"...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Apparently there is a meaning for paqueña (see above) - I have yet to establish, though, whether the thing my mum needed translating was using it, or was misspelling small :)

Thanks for the help.