This week I discovered that the French equivalent of a glance or a peek is un coup d’œil (‘a blow/stroke of the eye’), and to glance/peek is jeter un coup d’œil (‘to thow a stroke of the eye’) which I thought was an interesting way of saying it. Other ways of looking in French include voir (to look/see), un aperçu (a glimpse) and entrevoir / apercevoir (to glimpse)
Welsh equivalents of a glance or glimpse are cipolwg, cipdrem and cipedrych which is made up of cip (a snatching), golwg (sight, appearance, view), trem (look, sight) and edrych (to look/see).
Are there interesting equivalents of glance, glimpse, peek or related words in other languages?
Do other languages making a distinction between looking and seeing?
Scots has keek and Plattdeutsch has Kiek.
English has a few slang terms like butcher’s (rhyming slang: butcher’s hook = look), shufty (according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, from Arabic shufti = ‘I have seen’) and squiz (Aussie slang – “OED” suggests squint + quiz as possible origin).
In answer to the second question:
Latvian has redzēt – to see and skatīt – to look. The reflexive form skatīties is sometimes used to mean something like to have a look. Also, the prefix pa- can be added (paskatīt, paskatīties), which, if I remember rightly, gives the meaning of something like to have a brief look.
Finnish verbs related to seeing:
nähdä – to see
näkyä – to be seen/visible
katsoa – to look/watch
katsella – to look continually, to keep looking
katsahtaa – to have a brief look
katsahdella – to have several brief looks
vilkaista – to glance
vilkuilla – to glance around or repeatedly
kurkata – to peek
kurkkia – to peek repeatedly
kurkistaa – to take a short peek
kurkistella – to take repeated short peeks
tuijottaa – to stare
tuijotella – to stare continually or repeatedly
These are not just hypothetical forms but actually in use.
Polish: rzucić okiem “to glance”, lit. to throw [an] eye. Polish distinguishes between looking and seeing, what’s more it has suppletive perfective/imperfective verb pairs for both notions (patrzeć or patrzyć look.IMPF spojrzeć or popatrzyć, popatrzeć look.PFV, widzieć see.IMPF zobaczyć or ujrzeć see.PFV).
The Polish reminds me of Italian dare un’occhiata meaning to glance, to have a look, to throw a glance. Gettare uno sguardo means something similar.
Do any other languages have the same look/see/watch distinction as English? In Italian, I would tend to use guardare for look and watch in most cases, and vedere for see.