MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS! I couldn't find any proof that English As She Is Spoke inspired the Monty Python sketch, but it seems likely the boys were aware of this book. ALSO: I've just noticed Pedro wrote "Espagnish", not Espanglish. Apologies for incompetently handling his incompetence.
I once ordered a dongxiao (a type of Chinese flute), but received a dizi (another type of Chinese flute). Over the course of several e-mails, the seller could not understand my complaint. Through certain context clues in their messages, I came to the conclusion that they were running my English messages through a translator into Chinese; which was getting something wrong. So, I had someone on Reddit provide me the Chinese characters for the two respective flutes and replied to the seller using these characters alongside their Romanized spellings. The seller then immediately understood my predicament and replied, "I understand! You bought a flute, but we sent you a flute!" *Their translation software rendered the names of all of their various woodwind instruments into "flute" with no way of discerning which flute is which!* They let me keep the dizi and sent me my dongxiao at no extra charge. Language is fun.
I recall one anecdote where the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" was fed into the translation program of a computer, going from English to French to Chinese and back to English. The resulting translation was "Invisible Insane."
Well, that's not too far from the original idea. If something is out of sight, ye can't see it, and since "out of sight" and "invisible" are represented by the same word in Chinese, ye ends up with invisible. And that also applies to "out of mind".
@@montel_1 it's an understandable translation, but it is fairly far from the original idea. there is no hint of insanity in "out of mind" in the phrase
I heard a better one. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" was translated by computer to Russian, then back to English. The result was: The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.
In Germany we also enjoy to build english phrases from literal translations of german idioms... we call ist "English for Runaways" (german: "Englisch für Fortgeschrittene"), containing words and phrases, such as: Blowing chapel (german: "Blaskapelle") Front-Standing Before-Sitter (german "Vorstandsvorsitzender")
The fact that Mark Twain loved this book reminded me that people who are highly professional in their areas find things that are absurd and incompetent in the same area a great source of joy and laughter. Like I've seen some musicians laugh hysterically at recordings of bad orchestras etc.
5:17 I am reminded of a trend called "Google Translate Sings" where people would take the lyrics of an English song, push it through a series of 30 or so Google translations and then back to English and sing the resulting hilarious lyrics.
Kinda the same thought i had except it was a twitter account that would take magic the gathering cards and translate them through a bunch of different languages and then back into english.
That's really not fair. Translation is hard. If you ran some text through the best twenty human translators, you'd probably get something equally silly out the other end.
I can totally see "lochsmith" being an idiom in Scottish English for addressing a heavy drinker (and heavy for Scottish standards that is). Like in, "We've bin tae th' howf yesterday. Craig smithed a hail loch again."
This reminds me so much of the infamous "Star War: Backstroke of the West", with beautiful Chinese-to-English translation of subtitles. Instant classics such as "You two careful, he is a big", "I feel far from good", "the disgusting thing came"
Anakin: “And I just know an astonishing news. I think the pudding that the prime minister…” Windu: “West?” Another one of my favorites Obi Wan: “Looking me am a civilization person.”
The fish is called a « loup » (wolf), and that’s southern France’s word for a seabass, called a « bar » in the North. (Yes, the jokes write themselves…) A « loup de mer » is an idiom for an experienced seaman, captain Haddock in the Tintin albums being a prime example.
I think Wolf Fish is also a thing in English, it's a deep sea, and thus very bizarre and alien looking creature, if the thing in my mind right now is indeed what is called Wolf Fish (I haven't googled yet, but I want to record my guess and see if I am right).
@@CineMiamParisin Welsh, the name for Sea Bass (Draenog y Môr) translates as Hedgehog of the Sea. Something to do with it being a spiny fish? Draenog (hedgehog) comes from the word for a thorn I think.
I found the "john-meal" joke in French. The joke is that "jan-son" is "john bran" and "john meal" is about flour (my dictionary says it's called "meal" for oats and corn) and furfur was the latin word for bran.
Meal is a coarser grind than flour. But meal and flour also have some odd uses in English. Cooked oats = oatmeal, also known as porridge. And there is oat flour. Corn meal is common in the U.S., but you can get corn flour. However the British have oddly dubbed cornstarch (FR:amidon) "corn flour".
As a French, this makes no sense whatsoever. I think I remember reading about a "Jean Farine" which would be John Flour today. Meanings probably shifted in all three languages over time. That was also probably a politically charged pun relating to the famine and lack of bread given that Boileau lived right about the time of the French Revolution.
On Wikipedia I found a fac-simile of a book, written in older French, mentioning the encounter between a Cardinal de Janson and Boileau in detail. It does say flour. It appears to be some sort of letter or commentary addressed to jean Jacques Rousseau about the event, another later French famous writer and philosopher. There's no identification of the source of the fac simile unfortunately. I couldn't identify this Janson, there are a few referenced but none that fit the time frame. I am certain I heard this story in class in reference to the famine before the revolution though. It was almost 30 years ago though so... My school years, not the Janson-Boileau thing. 😅
Correct. Le son, d’avoine ou de blé, est l’enveloppe qui protège les grains de céréales. Obtenu lors de la mouture de la céréale, le son a longtemps été seulement valorisé pour nourrir les animaux. Son=bran=furfur
My family has a phrase “don’t put it in a windy” that we use as an all-purpose warning. It originated in a poorly translated set of instructions for something (I cannot remember what) in the 1980s that my Japanese sister-in-law brought to the US after a visit home. I assume that the product was intended for the domestic Japanese market, so an accurate English translation wasn’t really important. For example, if I am handing a sibling something and I need to let them know it’s fragile, I can say “Don’t put it in a windy.”
@@Sukigu Definitely wasn’t a candle! The things she’d bring as gifts were usually small, artisanal, that showed Japanese craftsmanship at its unique or best. Ceramics, paper, laquered wood and such. Maybe the warning was meant to advise to keep it out of direct sunlight?
Careful though. There was this thing named a floppy disk. You put it in your computer to store data on. Look images of it up. If you had a floppy copy, that meant you had a copy of your data on your floppy disk. The original data were stored on the 'hard disk' of the computer. If your computer crashed (and they did...) you still had your data on the floppy disk.
In The Netherlands I bought this book... It's called "I always get my sin" They are phrases from FAMOUS Dutch people that attempted to speak English. It is HI-LA-RIOUS. 😂😂😂 All the phrases are proper Dutch phrases with a dumb translation error. Just like the title of the book 'I always get my sin' comes from 'i krijg altijd mijn zin' As you can see the last word sin/zin look and sound alike, however 'zin' means 'my way' in this phrase. So instead of saying 'i always get my way' the person uttered 'i always get my sin' Another really funny one I can remember was a female politician that said: "I'm your new minister and I'm having my first period". 😂😂😂😂😅
Brilliant explanation!! If you want terrible translations, try Google translate! Yesterday i went along a row of silk pictures and used it to translate the titles.... Initially they weren't bad - especially on the "DETECT LANGUAGE" setting, but each time I went back to copy it down, I'd obtain a slightly different version.... Did they use Google translate from Dutch to American English piensos? 😂😂
My father read this as a university student and would often pull out some of these ridiculous phrases just to throw a curve ball in a conversation when we were kids, took me 30 years to find out he was actually quoting this book and not just freestyle riffing on his Goons and Monty Python fanaticism
@@xinpingdonohoe3978 it was a more "occasional" thing when we kids were talking nonsense as young kids do - as we inherited his fandom for the Goon Show and Monty Python we always just took them for what they seamed to be - surrealist statements like "Strikes heroic pose, but trousers fall down and ruin effect" (the Goon Show) when one of us came in to a room dramatically or "Vegetables boiled to a pap" (English as she is Spoke) when mum served up overly cooked vegetables
@@TheRealMarxz, as in “Dotted line from eyes to kilts. Fall down, naughty kilts. Dotted line becomes daggers. FALL DOWN, NAUGHTY KILTS!” “And what happened?” “My trousers fell down.” (The Great Maccreakie Uprising)
A goon show fan of that time would certainly love this book and memorise bits of it. At school we learned Spike Milligan's Milliganimals poems, and no teachers were involved!
It is hilarious! Reminds me of a book on language I read a few years ago, with some witty translations from Japanese to English. Something to the effect : “if a pedestrian hove across your path (you’re driving of course), tootle him. If he doesn’t move, tootle him with vigour.” Just a screamer!
I have a phrase book for German language written by a Thai for Thai tourists. It was published in 2006. There are phrases in it such as: “When will the next steam boat leave the harbor?” “Send a boy to take care of my boots at once!” “ I need a fresh horse!” When I got it from a Thai friend I couldn’t believe it. I took it from him and kept it for his own safety.
This reminds me of an infamous fan translation of a Japanese manga, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. For the longest time, the only English translation was a slapdash translation by a Chinese student in the early 2000s. He wasn't even using the original Japanese version, but rather a traditional Chinese translated version from Taiwan. That along with a very poor knowledge of English syntax, lead to amazing phrases like "Get a feeling so complicated," "Don't be dong" and "What a beautiful Duwang."
Probably a problem with autocorrect. Like when my ex texted me that she made an appointment to see the gynecologist, but somehow her phone decided she meant to say 'gunpowder' and left me terribly confused.
@@mikitz Updating phrase books spoils them. I have one that gives useful phrases in half a dozen languages, including "Here is the viol of the drops" and "Let him come in; I will interrogate him myself".
@@batkinssmart4273 My grandfather inherited a 5 language Peninsula War phrase book that my Dad and I used to read as kids in the 1930s and 1960s. In the 1800s the opening "s" in a word was printed in an elongated form so it looked more like an "f". As a result, in our family to this day we all say "fwamp" instead of "swamp". So, I agree, "Updating phrase books spoils them."
Seeing Rob talk about a book written in me native language made my day! 3:27 So, in Portuguese, "fazer o diabo a quatro" means something along the lines of "He raises hell" or "He causes chaos". And there's also another Portuguese/Brazilian idiom: "Fazer o caralho a quatro", which means the same as "Fazer o diabo a quatro", "diabo" and "caralho" are mere intensifiers in those sentences. "Diabo" on it's own means "devil", that's where you get the "devil" bit. And "Caralho" refers to the male reproductive organ, and it is used as a swear word, equivalent to the f-word.
@@unternehme Nice, now I've learnt an Italian idiom lol. Well, yeah, Portuguese and Italian are both romance languages so, yeah they're kind of similar
That is actually fascinating. Sex described as "devil at four (legs)" is on the same line as Shakespeare's vulgar line by Iago in _Othello,_ "the beast with two backs."
Although it was not the focal point of this video I found the use of the term "floppy copy" instead of "paperback" to be a highly amusing, insightful, and most delightful descriptor. Thank you for the additional term, I shall put it to good use forthwith. 😻
I'm reminded of a Japanese automobile manual with a badly translated instruction on the proper use of the horn : "If pedestrian heave into sight, tootle him melodiously. If pedestrian continue to heave, tootle him with vigour".
I have to say thank you a million times for this video and it's timing! I was really sad (as one usually is right before one's birthday), and then this video jumped onto my screen and brought me so much joy and genuine laughter I can't even describe! So now, as this legendary book says, I have to "Do the fine spirit"!
It sounds like that book could have inspired the 2008 Kia owners' handbook, which had clearly been translated from Korean to English by someone who didn't speak English - I wish I'd kept a copy of it when I sold the car, it was full of phrases like "For to opening the boot, be pressing the button" and similar gibberish.
I've occasionally run across users manuals for electrical product where it's been blatantly obvious that different people translated different sections, or possibly just the person doing the work was rushed for time at the end, so the first few pages are perfectly good English, or close enough, but the last few range from 'that took some effort to figure out' to 'utterly incomprehensible'. And at least 'for to opening the boot, be pressing the button' is fairly easy to figure out: to open the boot, press the button. There's the old classic of instructions that say 'do A' (turn page) 'but not before doing B'. A comedy sketch example (the pause while the page is turned sees the guy working on a car engine, I believe, do thing A... and promptly get a face full of oil or some such), but one does sometimes encounter such problems.
Oh, Engrish instruction manuals are the stuff of legend! 2008 is very late for a good one and Korea not the usual origin, try 1970s-80s Japanese products.
I suggested this topic! I sent the email introducing him to this! This is so cool! :D My personal favorite bit is the absolutely incomprehensible idiotism “He turns as a weath turcocl”. 17:00 EEEEEEEEEEEEE
Loved this. Reminds me of the recent discovery that the Scots Wikipedia was partially written by an American teenager using a dictionary and couldn't speak Scots.
I'm sure this happens with many versions of wikipedia in minority languages. A language with very few native speakers is bound to have only a few editors, and not all of them are going to be fully fluent in the language.
@@andressigalat602 Oh, honey, no… the Scots wiki scandal is not that. It was someone who spoke NONE of the target language and literally made up crap using the same approach as someone making fun of a language they don’t speak. (Think of someone mocking Chinese as sounding like “ching chong”.)
The saying you ended the video with is a Spanish/Latin American saying (perhaps also Portuguese): Del plato a la boca, se cae la sopa. (The soup falls from the plate to the mouth: many things can happen from the thought to the deed) I also saw the saying, something along the lines of "bad arrangement" and "process". The Spanish saying goes a little like "It's better a bad arrangement than a good (legal) fight". This author's work might have been inspired by a French work, but it relies heavily on Spanish and Portuguese sayings, much much more than French. (How about a little love for the Spanish and Portuguese) LOVE LOVE YOUR WORK!
As a Brazilian, I’m flattered to have such a remarkable book recognized by astonishing minds. Knowing something like this reminds me of how unfair it can be that we don’t have a Nobel or something.
Bro , your English sounds like that of Pedro Carolino! Mano, o teu inglês parece o desse Pedro Carolino! Na boa, continua estudando. Você já está na metade do caminho.
As an ESL teacher, I've come across quite a lot of this kind of stuff. Having to unteach it without making the people who taught it (sometimes my local colleagues) look bad is quite something.
I was teaching business English in Germany and was amused by some popular misconceptions Germans had of English. Later on I met a woman who taught English at a Gymnasium, (the German High School that prepares young people for university) so I asked her why so many Germans thought funny was the adjective of fun, saying things like, "We had a funny day today." She looked at me blankly for a moment, then said . "But it is, isn't it?" Aha! I thought, I see where the problem stems from!
@@martinphipps2 Yeah, but it a bit more complicated with German because English has German origins so many things are the same but there are always exceptions. In English we generally add a "y" to a noun to make an adjective, in German they add "ig" so fun, the noun, in German is Spass and fun, as an adjective is spassig. So it would be natural for Germans to think funny is simply the adjectival form of fun. Funny (ha ha) in German is witzig, and funny (peculiar) is seltsam or eigenartig.
@@mirandahotspring4019Beware of phrasing. English has German*ic* origins, not German origins. English and German have a common ancestor, but English doesn't come from German, but Proto-Germanic.
Learning a foreign language can be fraught. A friend, who was actually one of those who was accident prone, both literally and metaphorically. In her middle years she was living in Spain and wanted to buy a chicken but have its feet cut off. She asked for a polla sin zapatos. The butcher disappeared and after a few moments came back wiping his eyes with his old mother and asked my friend to repeat her request. After aged mother had stopped rolling on the floor she said Quieres un pollo sin patas. (For non Spanish speakers, she had asked for a male appendage without shoes. )
I got this too recently. I teach public schools so most kids are Hispanic. Few speak English well. So when I see them running in the hall I would try to say “caminar solamente!” Sometimes they’d look at me funny. I said it in front of the official translator and she also gave me a look. “Well, caminar means to walk, right? I don’t know how to say ‘don’t run,’ so wouldn’t ‘walking only’ work?” She laughed at me and said, “Spanglish works too.” I still don’t know what I was saying that made it unclear. Is it just European Spanish or something?
Before I visited Argentina many years ago, I remember browsing an Argentinian tourist phrase book. This sentence caught my eye: "There is a dead man on the street". Is this a common phrase for a tourist to use when visiting Argentina?
The presence of "torpedo" on the list of fishes is amusing from a modern perspective, but it turns out the weapon is actually named after a fish, so it's not wrong, although it's a bizarrely obscure choice to include.
Big congratulations on the birth of your baby daughter, Rob.. an amazing gift! You're a truly lovely fella and will be a fabulous daddy! Merry Christmas and much joy to you and your family.. 🎄🥂🤗💚
There's a saying in french that's appropriate to this video. Il/elle parle anglais comme une vache espagnole. They speak English as well as a Spanish cow (Spanish cows aren't well known for being fluent in English)
Hearing Rob speak the title of the book in my native language made my day! "To do the devil at four" corresponds to the portuguese idiom "fazer o diabo a quatro", which means something like "to cause a lot of problems, to make a great confusion".
Works in Italian as well "fare il diavolo a quattro", coming from the medieval usage of having multiple people acting as the Devil in plays, to allow for rapid costume changes.
We call it Ponglish, when someone translates Polish phrases word for word to English. For example: Thank you from the mountain (thank you in anvance), I feel train to you (I am attracted to you). There are loads of them.
@@RobWords Is it really? As I understand Denglish rather means the (possibly unnecessary and sometimes wrong) usage of English words or phrases in German, spoken or written but in all seriousness. From what I understand @nowymail meant taking a phrase and translate it word for word, ignoring any English grammar and if the English "translation" would make any sense in English as a joke, maybe even to mock Denglish (or Ponglish in their case), to exactly get the kind of laughs that book induces. But rather interestingly there seems to be an "opposite trend" nowadays, taking English phrases, translate them word for word into German and use them colloquially, maybe initially as a joke but some seem to stick. Like saying "Hölle, nein!" from the English "Hell, no!".
Spanglish is what we called the typical American understanding of the language, also the mistakes we made by substituting english words where we didn't know the spanish one.
Fun fact: "Gleek" (3:58) was an actual English card game, so it's possibly not a mistake. But Wikipedia says Gleek was popular "from the 16th century through the 18th century," so I'm not sure how common of a game it really was at the time this book was published. Also, Wikipedia says the name "Gleek" comes from the Old French "glic" which meant "a game of cards," so I don't know if some weird mistranslation stuff was going on that somehow resulted in Pedro thinking "Gleek" was the word for card games in general without realizing it was a specific card game. I'm not sure.
I read this book about 40 years ago and had almost completely forgotten it with the passing of time. Thank you for reviving so many good memories of hilarity in my youth.
in Fawlty Towers, John Cleese's magnum opus, the Spanish waiter Manuel famously says, "I speak English well. I learn it from a book." This is clearly the book he had in mind.
One of my favorite books, called "Sky my husband", treads the same path, but deliberately. The author, one John-Wolf Whistle (actually Jean-Loup Chifflet), endeavours to litterally translate French phrases and expressions in English, while very seriously posing as the inventor of a new method to speak it easily and quickly. This "guide of the running English" is absolutely hilarious.
@@davidlericain "Ciel! Mon mari" means something like "Heavens! My husband". It is a comedic trope or running gag in movies, series, comic books... It is said by an adulterous wife when her husband comes back home early while her lover is still in the house. The wife usually shouts that before trying to hide her lover in the closet or under the bed 😂
@@davidlericain "Ciel, mon mari!" said by a wife who's having a good time with her lover then hears her husband come home in an old film (I can't remember which). Translates to "Sky my husband!". Edit- spelling, must learn to proofread better.
That's it, "Ciel !" means "Good heavens!", so something like "Good heavens, my husband!" "It's a comedic trope often associated with farcical theater and melodrama. It supposedly originated in the 19th century and became a stereotypical line in French stage plays, particularly in the genre of boulevard theater-light, fast-paced comedies about domestic misunderstandings, infidelities, and absurd situations." (Thanks ChatGPT 😁)
To say thank you for the copy of the book with RobNotes! Twill be an thing of large amusement in I. (My English is getting better with every page turn...) 📖🥰
To understand the joke about Janson and “furfur” (timestamp 8:23), you need to understand that the French word for “brand” is “soon,“ and that the Latin word for “bran” is “furfur.“ So the weird sentence “the meal is better than the furfur” is just Fonseca’s fractured fumble towards “Flour is better than bran.”
As you can tell from the front page Rob shows at 11:17, "English As She Is Spoke" was not the original title of the book. That was a name given to it by the American publisher that reprinted it and hired Mark Twain to write a new preface.
@@GazilionPT That makes sense, but this substitute title, English As She Is Spoke, itself became a meme in English. I recall my older (much older) sister using it on me, once.
@@janTesika I agree with this. The dialectical variations of language was not as standardized among the lowly sailors before the 18th century, as some would have you believe.
Even in English, we tack 'sea' in front of 'sea urchin' because 'urchin' alone used to mean hedgehog. (street urchin being a poor Victorian child, of course)
Gleek had been a popular card game in England but its heyday was in the 17th century so around 200 years before this book. However the phrase "building castles in Spain" can be found in Chaucer. Usage of this seems to have petered out in the last 60 years or so.
I don't know my Shakespeare at all, apparently. I had no idea that the word was there. gleek to joke, to jeer, to scoff, A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM, iii. 1. 134; “gleeking,” HENRY V., v. 1. 68. A General Glossary to Shakespeare's Works. Alexander Dyce. Boston. Dana Estes and Company. 1904.
"Gleek" was used in Mork and Mindy for a device Mork needed to recharge his life force. I wonder if this came from a previous use or they just liked the sound?
I remember a TomTom GPS I had... once it asked me a *quadruple* negative about "am I sure I did not want to keep stopping not wanting to use expressways" or something like that. My brain locked up trying to decipher it and I nearly went through a stop sign.
was that one of those voices that was intentionally confusing? had a friend who had Mr.T voice on his TomTom and it constantly told you confusing instructions lol.
This is great! It reminded me of "From a 1965 honda Manual" ...tootle the horn trumpet to him melodiously at first. If he still obstacles your passage tootle him with vigor . Found Poetry!
TREMENDOUS! Thank you so much for the introduction. I visited Mark Twain's birth cabin in Missouri and they had some terrific examples of his prose, this was a great addition. If I live to be 100, I'll go out with the same comet that book-ended his life.
I'm originally from Montréal, Québec, 27 years ago, but an English-speaker. My wife and I humorously refer to eggnog as "chicken milk", because of "lait de poule" in French. She's originally German. We mangle English, French, Yiddish, and German. Since we live in Florida, there's also some mangled Spanish mixed in. It's fun!
@@laripu Same here! I mean, I'm an anglophone in Montreal and the French for "eggnog" looks funny to me. But I'm sure a lot of English compounds also sound goofy to people who aren't used to them. E.g. not-very-piglike animals being called hedgehogs and guinea pigs.
@@kirsten_snoose One thing I always found funny was the word "dandelion", which comes from French "dents de lion". Makes sense. And yet the French word is "pissenlit", which is ... something else. 😆
I stumbled across excerpts of this book back in the 80s when I worked at a library. It took years to finally track it down (once the internet came along) but it truly is valuable his weight's gold.
@@enlacostaizquierdaRob addresses this in his pinned comment. Look for “MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS” if you don’t see at the top of the comments. Rob says it’s unknown whether the book influenced them or not.
A frenchman is looking online for an english teacher. He calls the first one he finds: "Bonjour, combien pour les leçons ?" "30 euros de l'heure" It was too expansive. He calls a second one: "20 euros de l'heure" Still too expansive. The third one: "10 euros de l'heure !" The price was good. It was set to meet at the tracher's flat. The man knocks at the door, the teacher opens. The man : "Hello! Cheap English lessons here?" The teacher: "If, if ! Between !"
Haha, right up there with the guy drowning in the Seine yelling "help ! help! "....and the passerby yelling back to him saying " maybe you should have spent your money on swimming lessons instead of english lessons ." 🤔
One of my favorite books. A bunch of these phrases were also set to music by the band Cardiacs which is how I first found it. Listen to Cry Wet Smile Dry and Sleep All Eyes Open. Thanks for the video, Rob. :)
The two examples at 14:25 were also used directly on Tim Smith's Spratleys - Fanny! It amuses me greatly that they were able to write coherent songs using such botched phrases!
'The Book of Heroic Failures' - Stephen Pile - introduced me to this tale, many years ago. It's a great book. Absolutely hilarious! So happy to have "To craunch a marmoset" explained. Cheers!
I noticed "To sin in trouble water" which is a true delicacy as he made an error on the French words "Pécher" (to fish) and "Pêcher"(to sin). "Pécher en eaux troubles" means "to hang out with the wrong crowd". Anyway those silly translations always make me laugh and I had some hilarious times translating a French text to Japanese for example and the back to French. I don't know if it's the same now with the improvement of automatic translators though...
@dominiquebois I believe you have flipped the two spellings: pécher is to sin, pêcher is to fish. As I remember from primary school, this allows some interesting interpretations when reading the New Testament.
@@yveslafrance2806 Yep, I flipped the accents though it's my native language. I sometimes hate them. May I add as "un pêcher" is also a peach tree in French that we could have "peach tree in trouble water" which is a fascinating sentence, isn't it ? By the way too, "avoir la pêche" is used to qualify someone healthy and dynamic so the expression "il a une pêche du tonnerre" could be word-to-word translated in "he's got a thunder's peach". Pretty confusing when you just listen at.😊
This is an amazing gem! 🤣 As a French speaker, I went through the book and tried to guess the "original" French sentences. Some were really funny and some others... I couldn't even guess what the author had in mind! If ever you need help with French content, you can count me in. Linguistic is so fun! For the curious ones, "These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth" was probably " Ces abricots et ses pêches me donnent l'eau à la bouche" (which refer to salivating just by looking at the food). And my favorite: "Why you no helps me to?" 😂 Should print that one on a shirt.
What a fun video with so much detail! At the beginning of the video, I was saying, “Oh, I hope Rob goes through this book and gives us a taste of what it says!” Thank you so much for this!🙏☮️
Well bugger me! Both my parents used the "English as she is spoke" phrase: I grew up hearing it. But I had always thought it was just one of my mother's phrases. Hadn't realised until to-night that it was actually the name of a real book. But then again, it wasn't uncommon for either of my parents to speak Middle English; & often they'd pronounce every letter of words like "wife" & "knee" etc. It was only when I myself was reading history that I finally realised that it wasn't just a shared 'made up' language my parents spoke when they were messing about. And I wish so much that I'd asked them how that came about: - especially as my Grandmother refused to let my mother attend Cambridge, to which she'd won a scholarship. As soon as my Grandfather died my mother was made to go and work in a sweet shop. And I had always thought my father had read Economics - not Engl. Lit. Just one of those (many) questions one leaves it too late to ask.
@@thomaswilliams2273I would expect it did - especially for short, tricky words. But, unfortunately AI tends to do that too: and completely changes the pronunciation. Biggest bug-bear there is the word "epitome". I've now heard one or two reactors have included "eppy-tome" to their vocabulary INSTEAD of pronouncing the letters/syllable in "tome" as "toe-me": (E-pit- oh-me").Along with the made-up word "coron-ated" instead of the perfectly short and direct "crowned".🤔
On the subject of trying to speak the language I went to Portugal last year and decided to learn a bit on Duolingo Then, when I was there, I had all the waiters telling me not to bother because they didn't have time for all that! Which was nice
cities are cities no matter where you go. jobs are jobs no matter where you go. i know i don't have time to play " help the foreigner cosplay " at my job. service, payment, leave. do that a hundred times in a day. go home cry and wake up again to the capitalist hellscape. repeat.
Portuguese people tend to speak excellent English, which is great for travelers. I also want to note that if you do try to learn it, they will happily assist you.
"honest & upright idiot" is such a perfect Twain bar lol ❤😂 What a legend. I hope they're still teaching him vigorously throughout elementary, middle & some high school in the US
Presumably after learning of English As She Is Spoke, Twain went on to translate his story The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County into French, and then forcibly translate it back into English word by word, resulting in an entertaining, if barely comprehensible, word salad. He published all three versions of the story in a single volume titled "The Jumping Frog: In English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil".
Fabulous video Rob! And how nice to read so many genuinely informative and interesting comments here too! I'm now going to throw off my cornet and skate and craunch a marmoset dressed in just my patches and a sash fastened with a spindle! 😄
I used to wonder why the Scots used "the day" for today. There are several examples of this sort of thing. On teaching myself Scots Gaelic I realise it's a straight translation into English. In this case "an diugh" The day although via Google is An latha.
The same happened in Ireland. The quaint characteristics of Irish English are a result of widespread direct translation when Irish Gaelic was banned, especially in public.
This reminds me of the hilarious instruction leaflet supplied with an electric iron my father bought in the 1970s, which had been imported from Czechoslovakia. The first line read "Divide the tissues according to their names."
Rob, thank you for this hilarious gem! I was roflcoptering like crazy! Until you explained this early version of a Google translated Chinese-to-English-to-German product manual, I thought this man must have been the greatest satirical artist of his time. So fast makes him that nobody after! (Which everyone with a grasp of German will understand instantly!) "In the country of blinds" by the way might in fact have been early Google translated from German. We use exactly the same phrase. And by the way - I did not occur to me so far that it was Mark Twain, of all writers, who pioneered the concept of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Have a great weekend!
I have enjoyed all of your videos, this one though, had me laughing the entire time! I will definitely be getting the version with your notes. Thank you!
"he do the devil at four" sounds like the Italian saying "fare il diavolo a quattro" (to do the devil at four, or a devil multiplied for four) meaning to do the impossible in order to achieve something
I can enlighten you on two weird bits of vocab there. "Some wigs", listed under "Eatings", are a sort of bread bun or roll, flavoured with caraway that were a popular breakfast food in England into the C19. "Gleek" was an old fashioned card game so definitely belongs in Entertainments.
I've been watching your videos for ages and my wife has just started doing the same. She described you as the "Professor Brian Cox of Words" because she doesn't care about language (just like she doesn't care about space) but despite that, it somehow becomes fascinating when you're talking about it.
It is hilarious! And as soon as you said " to come water in mouth", it was obvious for my french brain that all this was probably translated from french. "En avoir l'eau a la bouche", my mouth is watering 🤤. I dead myself in envy : "j'en meurs d'envie", I'm dying for it ⚰️. He is valuable his weight's gold : "il vaut son pesant d'or", it's worth its weight in gold 🏅. To force to forge, becomes smith: "c'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron" , practice makes perfect 🗡⚒️. To come back at their muttons : "revenir à ses moutons" (getting back to your sheep), going back to your original concerns 🐑🐏. And last but not least, my favourite : Few, few, the bird make her nest : "petit à petit l'oiseau fait son nid", little by little, the bird makes its nest 🐦🪺.
It sounds like a 19th century version of the RUclips channel Twisted Translations, which takes English song lyrics and runs them through a variety of languages in Google Translate then back to English, with hilarious results.
I'd also recommend StarvHarv's Badly Translated History series, as well as when he goes through various Wikipedias originally in languages with bad Google Translation quality.
I came here to post the same comment. Malinda, the instigator of that series eventually ended it because the gradual improvements in Google Translate, made it increasingly difficult to get humorous results. I recommend familiarizing yourself with the real lyrics to the songs before listening to the twisted ones. Cheers 👍
@@RobWords Excellent, will we entice Rob into The Pond? :D (a name given to Cardiacs fans, 'look at all the little fishes in the pond' he said at gigs)
MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS!
I couldn't find any proof that English As She Is Spoke inspired the Monty Python sketch, but it seems likely the boys were aware of this book.
ALSO: I've just noticed Pedro wrote "Espagnish", not Espanglish. Apologies for incompetently handling his incompetence.
I will not buy this record. It is scratched.
@@StamfordBridge Meaning?
Sorry squire. Scratched your record!
No no. This is a tobacconist. TOBACCONIST!
@ Ahh!!! I will not buy this tobacconist. It is scratched. 😊
I once ordered a dongxiao (a type of Chinese flute), but received a dizi (another type of Chinese flute). Over the course of several e-mails, the seller could not understand my complaint. Through certain context clues in their messages, I came to the conclusion that they were running my English messages through a translator into Chinese; which was getting something wrong. So, I had someone on Reddit provide me the Chinese characters for the two respective flutes and replied to the seller using these characters alongside their Romanized spellings.
The seller then immediately understood my predicament and replied, "I understand! You bought a flute, but we sent you a flute!"
*Their translation software rendered the names of all of their various woodwind instruments into "flute" with no way of discerning which flute is which!*
They let me keep the dizi and sent me my dongxiao at no extra charge. Language is fun.
Felicitation at thee
I understand! You bought a flute, but we sent you a flute!
@@hujiachen6409 well, they werent wrong😂
I am feeling rejoice of your history.
Your story almost had me in tears ❤ glad everything worked out
I recall one anecdote where the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" was fed into the translation program of a computer, going from English to French to Chinese and back to English. The resulting translation was "Invisible Insane."
Well, that's not too far from the original idea. If something is out of sight, ye can't see it, and since "out of sight" and "invisible" are represented by the same word in Chinese, ye ends up with invisible. And that also applies to "out of mind".
@@montel_1 it's an understandable translation, but it is fairly far from the original idea. there is no hint of insanity in "out of mind" in the phrase
Oh, that’s brilliant!
I heard a better one. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" was translated by computer to Russian, then back to English. The result was:
The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.
Loin des yeux, loin du cœur (far from eyes, far from heart)
When Manuel from Fawlty towers said he learned English "from a book", was it this book?
Manuel, what have you got on those trays?
¿Que?
"ON... THOSE... TRAYS"...
No, no Mr Fawlty; "UNO, DOS, TRES"!
"Eez no rat! Eez hamster."
(Other than ordering two beers, this is the only Spanish I know.)
"No, not pig! Pigeon (i.e., pidgen - the joke isn't as funny in print, lol) like your English."
He pronounced the words as they are written. Le are ned.
The first language of Andrew Sachs, who played the part of Manuel, was German.
The inspiration for Monty Python’s Hungarian phrase book with entries like “My hovercraft is full of eels”
I will not buy this record, it is scratched.
Do you want to come back to my place? Bouncy bouncy!
I am no longer infected.
In Germany we also enjoy to build english phrases from literal translations of german idioms... we call ist "English for Runaways" (german: "Englisch für Fortgeschrittene"), containing words and phrases, such as:
Blowing chapel (german: "Blaskapelle")
Front-Standing Before-Sitter (german "Vorstandsvorsitzender")
The fact that Mark Twain loved this book reminded me that people who are highly professional in their areas find things that are absurd and incompetent in the same area a great source of joy and laughter. Like I've seen some musicians laugh hysterically at recordings of bad orchestras etc.
I remember a small suite of computer programs (hi HOSPOWER) written in bad COBOL which made me laugh out loud…but I guess you just had to be there.
you don't even have to be a musician, if you like music, listen to Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart. trust me.
Lt. Joe Kenda says he loves Stepbrothers and other Will Ferrell movies. It’s the opposite of what he faced in his working life
@@thecianinator trout mask replica has no incompetence
Trout Mask Replica is a masterpiece
5:17 I am reminded of a trend called "Google Translate Sings" where people would take the lyrics of an English song, push it through a series of 30 or so Google translations and then back to English and sing the resulting hilarious lyrics.
Kinda the same thought i had except it was a twitter account that would take magic the gathering cards and translate them through a bunch of different languages and then back into english.
That's really not fair. Translation is hard. If you ran some text through the best twenty human translators, you'd probably get something equally silly out the other end.
Malinda's vdieo are still funny IMO.
@@michaelsommers2356 The concept of fairness doesn't really apply to algorithms, I think.
@@michaelsommers2356 I think the point is having fun, not being fair.
I lost it at the lochsmith
I imagined a fierce man, feared across the lands, who wrought havoc and lakes alike...
But did he win a prize for that? 🤔
It´s the Scottish version of a locksmith
Calls for the Lochpicking Lawman.
I can totally see "lochsmith" being an idiom in Scottish English for addressing a heavy drinker (and heavy for Scottish standards that is).
Like in, "We've bin tae th' howf yesterday. Craig smithed a hail loch again."
well who else is going to make the lakes
“I dead myself in envy” is a bar and I will hear no arguments to contrary
as a fellow bar appreciator I second this
This reminds me so much of the infamous "Star War: Backstroke of the West", with beautiful Chinese-to-English translation of subtitles. Instant classics such as "You two careful, he is a big", "I feel far from good", "the disgusting thing came"
Also, Vader's dramatic "NO!" being rendered as "Do not want!"
"I feel far from good."
👍
Anakin: “And I just know an astonishing news. I think the pudding that the prime minister…”
Windu: “West?”
Another one of my favorites
Obi Wan: “Looking me am a civilization person.”
In French there is a fish called "loup de mer" or "wolf of the sea". Probably why "wolf" appears on the list of fish.
The fish is called a « loup » (wolf), and that’s southern France’s word for a seabass, called a « bar » in the North. (Yes, the jokes write themselves…) A « loup de mer » is an idiom for an experienced seaman, captain Haddock in the Tintin albums being a prime example.
I think Wolf Fish is also a thing in English, it's a deep sea, and thus very bizarre and alien looking creature, if the thing in my mind right now is indeed what is called Wolf Fish (I haven't googled yet, but I want to record my guess and see if I am right).
@@leeborocz-johnson1649 i also thought of wolf fish when i heard that bit
@@leeborocz-johnson1649 It's bizarre looking, I guess, but it's not a deep sea fish. It's a type of bass.
@@CineMiamParisin Welsh, the name for Sea Bass (Draenog y Môr) translates as Hedgehog of the Sea. Something to do with it being a spiny fish? Draenog (hedgehog) comes from the word for a thorn I think.
I found the "john-meal" joke in French. The joke is that "jan-son" is "john bran" and "john meal" is about flour (my dictionary says it's called "meal" for oats and corn)
and furfur was the latin word for bran.
Meal is a coarser grind than flour. But meal and flour also have some odd uses in English. Cooked oats = oatmeal, also known as porridge. And there is oat flour. Corn meal is common in the U.S., but you can get corn flour. However the British have oddly dubbed cornstarch (FR:amidon) "corn flour".
Thank you. I couldn't find it.
As a French, this makes no sense whatsoever. I think I remember reading about a "Jean Farine" which would be John Flour today. Meanings probably shifted in all three languages over time. That was also probably a politically charged pun relating to the famine and lack of bread given that Boileau lived right about the time of the French Revolution.
On Wikipedia I found a fac-simile of a book, written in older French, mentioning the encounter between a Cardinal de Janson and Boileau in detail. It does say flour. It appears to be some sort of letter or commentary addressed to jean Jacques Rousseau about the event, another later French famous writer and philosopher. There's no identification of the source of the fac simile unfortunately. I couldn't identify this Janson, there are a few referenced but none that fit the time frame. I am certain I heard this story in class in reference to the famine before the revolution though. It was almost 30 years ago though so... My school years, not the Janson-Boileau thing. 😅
Correct.
Le son, d’avoine ou de blé, est l’enveloppe qui protège les grains de céréales. Obtenu lors de la mouture de la céréale, le son a longtemps été seulement valorisé pour nourrir les animaux.
Son=bran=furfur
My family has a phrase “don’t put it in a windy” that we use as an all-purpose warning. It originated in a poorly translated set of instructions for something (I cannot remember what) in the 1980s that my Japanese sister-in-law brought to the US after a visit home. I assume that the product was intended for the domestic Japanese market, so an accurate English translation wasn’t really important.
For example, if I am handing a sibling something and I need to let them know it’s fragile, I can say “Don’t put it in a windy.”
@@katebowers8107 🤣👏💚
Googling for that expression I get a few results saying "don't put it in a windy spot," most of them referring to candles. Maybe that's the origin.
could also be a clothes dryer, though idk if those were/are common in japan
@@Sukigu
Definitely wasn’t a candle! The things she’d bring as gifts were usually small, artisanal, that showed Japanese craftsmanship at its unique or best. Ceramics, paper, laquered wood and such. Maybe the warning was meant to advise to keep it out of direct sunlight?
On the direct sunlight theory,
maybe it meant window?
"A floppy copy"??!?!?!?!?! Why have a never heard a paperback called that? I will forever call it a Floppy Copy. Thank you!
Careful though. There was this thing named a floppy disk. You put it in your computer to store data on. Look images of it up.
If you had a floppy copy, that meant you had a copy of your data on your floppy disk. The original data were stored on the 'hard disk' of the computer. If your computer crashed (and they did...) you still had your data on the floppy disk.
In The Netherlands I bought this book... It's called "I always get my sin"
They are phrases from FAMOUS Dutch people that attempted to speak English. It is HI-LA-RIOUS. 😂😂😂
All the phrases are proper Dutch phrases with a dumb translation error. Just like the title of the book 'I always get my sin' comes from 'i krijg altijd mijn zin'
As you can see the last word sin/zin look and sound alike, however 'zin' means 'my way' in this phrase. So instead of saying 'i always get my way' the person uttered 'i always get my sin'
Another really funny one I can remember was a female politician that said:
"I'm your new minister and I'm having my first period". 😂😂😂😂😅
Brilliant explanation!!
If you want terrible translations, try Google translate! Yesterday i went along a row of silk pictures and used it to translate the titles.... Initially they weren't bad - especially on the "DETECT LANGUAGE" setting, but each time I went back to copy it down, I'd obtain a slightly different version....
Did they use Google translate from Dutch to American English piensos? 😂😂
My father read this as a university student and would often pull out some of these ridiculous phrases just to throw a curve ball in a conversation when we were kids, took me 30 years to find out he was actually quoting this book and not just freestyle riffing on his Goons and Monty Python fanaticism
Your Dad was my kind of guy!
To what extent did you grow to become acquainted with these phrases? If they were thrown at you now, would they still be nonsensical to you?
@@xinpingdonohoe3978 it was a more "occasional" thing when we kids were talking nonsense as young kids do - as we inherited his fandom for the Goon Show and Monty Python we always just took them for what they seamed to be - surrealist statements like "Strikes heroic pose, but trousers fall down and ruin effect" (the Goon Show) when one of us came in to a room dramatically or "Vegetables boiled to a pap" (English as she is Spoke) when mum served up overly cooked vegetables
@@TheRealMarxz, as in
“Dotted line from eyes to kilts. Fall down, naughty kilts. Dotted line becomes daggers. FALL DOWN, NAUGHTY KILTS!”
“And what happened?”
“My trousers fell down.” (The Great Maccreakie Uprising)
A goon show fan of that time would certainly love this book and memorise bits of it. At school we learned Spike Milligan's Milliganimals poems, and no teachers were involved!
It is hilarious! Reminds me of a book on language I read a few years ago, with some witty translations from Japanese to English. Something to the effect : “if a pedestrian hove across your path (you’re driving of course), tootle him. If he doesn’t move, tootle him with vigour.” Just a screamer!
Reminds me of the David Sedaris book 'When you are engulfed in flames'. The title is from a helpful Japanese Fire Safety Notice for English-readers.
if you are up for a laugh look up korean girl teaching English. how to pronounce "Coke" (the drink)
@rhetorical1488 OK, the coke video is hilarious, but there's no way that's serious. She can barely restrain the grin! Epic trolling, in my opinion. 😅
I had/may still have that book with the "tootle" phrases. Love it 😅
Bill Bryson Mother Tongue! I love that book.
I have a phrase book for German language written by a Thai for Thai tourists. It was published in 2006. There are phrases in it such as:
“When will the next steam boat leave the harbor?”
“Send a boy to take care of my boots at once!”
“ I need a fresh horse!”
When I got it from a Thai friend I couldn’t believe it. I took it from him and kept it for his own safety.
You sure it wasn't 1906?
@@1Thunderfire 😀
Hilarious! That might have been a useful phrase book... 150 years ago.
A German phrasebook I used in the 80s gave the word for quill instead of pen.
😂 I love it!
This reminds me of an infamous fan translation of a Japanese manga, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. For the longest time, the only English translation was a slapdash translation by a Chinese student in the early 2000s. He wasn't even using the original Japanese version, but rather a traditional Chinese translated version from Taiwan. That along with a very poor knowledge of English syntax, lead to amazing phrases like "Get a feeling so complicated," "Don't be dong" and "What a beautiful Duwang."
A Dublin restaurant had "aborigines" on its menu. I hope they meant "aubergines."
Maybe it just meant "locally produced food" ("aborigine" literally means "from the original place" and is basically equivalent to "native"). 😉
@@RFC3514 that's my first thought too. "local cuisine", "local ingredients", something like that
@@drezhb - Or they could just be implementing Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal", of course.
Probably a problem with autocorrect. Like when my ex texted me that she made an appointment to see the gynecologist, but somehow her phone decided she meant to say 'gunpowder' and left me terribly confused.
@@SynchroScore I doubt it. I saw this on my first trip to Ireland more than thirty years ago!
I love the word 'idiotisms' instead of 'idioms' and I challenge anyone to insert the phrase 'He do the devil at four' into casual conversation!
In Italian "fare il diavolo a quattro" means "to be very noisy or angry". I guess the French expression is the same 😊
@@sabrinasambo7570 Same in Portuguese, which is why it's there in the book. :)
In French, _idiotisme_ is another word for _idiome_ .
@@WoefulMinion Thank you - I had no idea!
I have an idea of what “ doing the devil…” is, but I have a dirty mind.
I think he may have the last laugh. How many other dictionaries from that era are still in print?
Probably those that have been updated from time to time and which actually teach you something useful.
@@mikitz "Updated from time to time" disqualifies them from being "still in print". Nor does it preclude him from having the last laugh.
@@mikitz Updating phrase books spoils them. I have one that gives useful phrases in half a dozen languages, including "Here is the viol of the drops" and "Let him come in; I will interrogate him myself".
Will laugh good who will laugh the latest
@@batkinssmart4273 My grandfather inherited a 5 language Peninsula War phrase book that my Dad and I used to read as kids in the 1930s and 1960s. In the 1800s the opening "s" in a word was printed in an elongated form so it looked more like an "f". As a result, in our family to this day we all say "fwamp" instead of "swamp". So, I agree, "Updating phrase books spoils them."
I have heard of this book before and “To craunch a marmoset” is my favourite - although I’m glad you have unfathomed the unfathomable¡
to que a que?
As a Scotsman, I'm okay with the Lochsmith. So long as it involves large bodies of water.
In the US, unfortunately, people would pronounce it the same as locksmith.
Gigantic enjoyment had this video.
Of I, additional.
That more multiplicity of thumbs this caption has not, large unknowing is.
😂😂😂
I twoth that.
Hither me I book enjoy probably!
Seeing Rob talk about a book written in me native language made my day!
3:27 So, in Portuguese, "fazer o diabo a quatro" means something along the lines of "He raises hell" or "He causes chaos". And there's also another Portuguese/Brazilian idiom: "Fazer o caralho a quatro", which means the same as "Fazer o diabo a quatro", "diabo" and "caralho" are mere intensifiers in those sentences. "Diabo" on it's own means "devil", that's where you get the "devil" bit. And "Caralho" refers to the male reproductive organ, and it is used as a swear word, equivalent to the f-word.
interesting, it is the same in Italian "fare il diavolo a quattro"
@@unternehme Nice, now I've learnt an Italian idiom lol. Well, yeah, Portuguese and Italian are both romance languages so, yeah they're kind of similar
That is actually fascinating.
Sex described as "devil at four (legs)" is on the same line as Shakespeare's vulgar line by Iago in _Othello,_ "the beast with two backs."
Doesn’t “caralho” mean “fellow” or something?
@@ferretyluv if someone told you that they were messing with you lol
Although it was not the focal point of this video I found the use of the term "floppy copy" instead of "paperback" to be a highly amusing, insightful, and most delightful descriptor. Thank you for the additional term, I shall put it to good use forthwith. 😻
I missed that one, and it's one of the best! Also, how did we use floppy discs for so long without having floppy copies!!? 😅
My age is showing, as my first thought was, "They're distributing this book on floppy disks? Like as a marketing gimmick?"
@@sonclearbrahman-ar1461that was a common phrase if you were a tech person back then
@@softy8088that would be great lol
@@artemis.nnnnnbbbbb 😎
I'm reminded of a Japanese automobile manual with a badly translated instruction on the proper use of the horn : "If pedestrian heave into sight, tootle him melodiously. If pedestrian continue to heave, tootle him with vigour".
I have to say thank you a million times for this video and it's timing! I was really sad (as one usually is right before one's birthday), and then this video jumped onto my screen and brought me so much joy and genuine laughter I can't even describe! So now, as this legendary book says, I have to "Do the fine spirit"!
It sounds like that book could have inspired the 2008 Kia owners' handbook, which had clearly been translated from Korean to English by someone who didn't speak English - I wish I'd kept a copy of it when I sold the car, it was full of phrases like "For to opening the boot, be pressing the button" and similar gibberish.
I've occasionally run across users manuals for electrical product where it's been blatantly obvious that different people translated different sections, or possibly just the person doing the work was rushed for time at the end, so the first few pages are perfectly good English, or close enough, but the last few range from 'that took some effort to figure out' to 'utterly incomprehensible'.
And at least 'for to opening the boot, be pressing the button' is fairly easy to figure out: to open the boot, press the button. There's the old classic of instructions that say 'do A' (turn page) 'but not before doing B'. A comedy sketch example (the pause while the page is turned sees the guy working on a car engine, I believe, do thing A... and promptly get a face full of oil or some such), but one does sometimes encounter such problems.
Oh, Engrish instruction manuals are the stuff of legend! 2008 is very late for a good one and Korea not the usual origin, try 1970s-80s Japanese products.
I suggested this topic! I sent the email introducing him to this! This is so cool! :D
My personal favorite bit is the absolutely incomprehensible idiotism “He turns as a weath turcocl”.
17:00 EEEEEEEEEEEEE
Hey, great job! I hope you continue to inspire videos as interesting as this one :)
Thank you so much! ❤
There needs to be a subreddit to find the other book that he used to translate these from
How cool is that? Congratulations Jesse!🎉🎉🎉
Thank you for your service. How i the name of pluperfect past participles did you run cross it in the first place?
Loved this. Reminds me of the recent discovery that the Scots Wikipedia was partially written by an American teenager using a dictionary and couldn't speak Scots.
I'm sure this happens with many versions of wikipedia in minority languages. A language with very few native speakers is bound to have only a few editors, and not all of them are going to be fully fluent in the language.
@@andressigalat602 Oh, honey, no… the Scots wiki scandal is not that. It was someone who spoke NONE of the target language and literally made up crap using the same approach as someone making fun of a language they don’t speak. (Think of someone mocking Chinese as sounding like “ching chong”.)
The saying you ended the video with is a Spanish/Latin American saying (perhaps also Portuguese): Del plato a la boca, se cae la sopa. (The soup falls from the plate to the mouth: many things can happen from the thought to the deed) I also saw the saying, something along the lines of "bad arrangement" and "process". The Spanish saying goes a little like "It's better a bad arrangement than a good (legal) fight". This author's work might have been inspired by a French work, but it relies heavily on Spanish and Portuguese sayings, much much more than French. (How about a little love for the Spanish and Portuguese) LOVE LOVE YOUR WORK!
As a Brazilian, I’m flattered to have such a remarkable book recognized by astonishing minds. Knowing something like this reminds me of how unfair it can be that we don’t have a Nobel or something.
Deve ser porque quem escreveu foi um tuga, né.
??!
Bro , your English sounds like that of Pedro Carolino!
Mano, o teu inglês parece o desse Pedro Carolino! Na boa, continua estudando. Você já está na metade do caminho.
As an ESL teacher, I've come across quite a lot of this kind of stuff. Having to unteach it without making the people who taught it (sometimes my local colleagues) look bad is quite something.
I was teaching business English in Germany and was amused by some popular misconceptions Germans had of English.
Later on I met a woman who taught English at a Gymnasium, (the German High School that prepares young people for university) so I asked her why so many Germans thought funny was the adjective of fun, saying things like, "We had a funny day today."
She looked at me blankly for a moment, then said . "But it is, isn't it?"
Aha! I thought, I see where the problem stems from!
@@mirandahotspring4019 It's like the "English teacher" in Korea who was teaching "firth, seconth, thirth," etc.
@@martinphipps2 Yeah, but it a bit more complicated with German because English has German origins so many things are the same but there are always exceptions. In English we generally add a "y" to a noun to make an adjective, in German they add "ig" so fun, the noun, in German is Spass and fun, as an adjective is spassig. So it would be natural for Germans to think funny is simply the adjectival form of fun.
Funny (ha ha) in German is witzig, and funny (peculiar) is seltsam or eigenartig.
@@mirandahotspring4019Beware of phrasing. English has German*ic* origins, not German origins. English and German have a common ancestor, but English doesn't come from German, but Proto-Germanic.
True. Interestingly about 60% of English words have lexical and/or phonetical similarity with modern German.
Learning a foreign language can be fraught. A friend, who was actually one of those who was accident prone, both literally and metaphorically. In her middle years she was living in Spain and wanted to buy a chicken but have its feet cut off.
She asked for a polla sin zapatos.
The butcher disappeared and after a few moments came back wiping his eyes with his old mother and asked my friend to repeat her request. After aged mother had stopped rolling on the floor she said Quieres un pollo sin patas.
(For non Spanish speakers, she had asked for a male appendage without shoes. )
This got me laughing pretty good 🤣🤣🤣
This has had me giggling for ages now 😂
😂
I loved the fact that it was so funny, he had to share it with his Mama!
I got this too recently. I teach public schools so most kids are Hispanic. Few speak English well. So when I see them running in the hall I would try to say “caminar solamente!” Sometimes they’d look at me funny. I said it in front of the official translator and she also gave me a look. “Well, caminar means to walk, right? I don’t know how to say ‘don’t run,’ so wouldn’t ‘walking only’ work?” She laughed at me and said, “Spanglish works too.” I still don’t know what I was saying that made it unclear. Is it just European Spanish or something?
Before I visited Argentina many years ago, I remember browsing an Argentinian tourist phrase book. This sentence caught my eye: "There is a dead man on the street". Is this a common phrase for a tourist to use when visiting Argentina?
My elderly Aunt from Jamaica said the “speed humps’ in the streets were called “sleeping policemen”… Perhaps it was a reference to a speed bump?
Also known as Sleeping Cops in Australia in the seventies.
@@bacallkitty3079 I may remember it wrong.
Yes
@@alexjames1146 I remember them as Silent Cops... although I guess a sleeping one is silent too :)
The presence of "torpedo" on the list of fishes is amusing from a modern perspective, but it turns out the weapon is actually named after a fish, so it's not wrong, although it's a bizarrely obscure choice to include.
Big congratulations on the birth of your baby daughter, Rob.. an amazing gift! You're a truly lovely fella and will be a fabulous daddy! Merry Christmas and much joy to you and your family.. 🎄🥂🤗💚
There's a saying in french that's appropriate to this video.
Il/elle parle anglais comme une vache espagnole.
They speak English as well as a Spanish cow
(Spanish cows aren't well known for being fluent in English)
That saying is a favourite of mine. I discussed it in a video over on my Patreon. Those poor Spanish cows...
Certains pensent que l'expression originelle était "basque espagnol"
Flatulent in all languages, however... 😅
@@sonclearbrahman-ar1461😂
I'm glad you explained it, jokes are always better when they are explained. 😅😅😂
Hearing Rob speak the title of the book in my native language made my day!
"To do the devil at four" corresponds to the portuguese idiom "fazer o diabo a quatro", which means something like "to cause a lot of problems, to make a great confusion".
Could be a title to a bizarrely themed adult movie too...
Works in Italian as well "fare il diavolo a quattro", coming from the medieval usage of having multiple people acting as the Devil in plays, to allow for rapid costume changes.
@@NicolaRomano That's very interesting! I had no idea of the origin of this idiom. Thanks for the clarification!
We call it Ponglish, when someone translates Polish phrases word for word to English. For example: Thank you from the mountain (thank you in anvance), I feel train to you (I am attracted to you). There are loads of them.
It's Denglisch over here in Germany
@@RobWords Was Deutschlish when I worked in Hamburg. (40 years ago) - Although in Denmark it was Danglish. Just dont ask who the InselApfen are.
@@RobWords Is it really? As I understand Denglish rather means the (possibly unnecessary and sometimes wrong) usage of English words or phrases in German, spoken or written but in all seriousness. From what I understand @nowymail meant taking a phrase and translate it word for word, ignoring any English grammar and if the English "translation" would make any sense in English as a joke, maybe even to mock Denglish (or Ponglish in their case), to exactly get the kind of laughs that book induces. But rather interestingly there seems to be an "opposite trend" nowadays, taking English phrases, translate them word for word into German and use them colloquially, maybe initially as a joke but some seem to stick. Like saying "Hölle, nein!" from the English "Hell, no!".
Spanglish is what we called the typical American understanding of the language, also the mistakes we made by substituting english words where we didn't know the spanish one.
I once heard whatever it is that Jean Claude van Damme is doing as speaking “zen Franglais” and it still cracks me up.
Fun fact: "Gleek" (3:58) was an actual English card game, so it's possibly not a mistake. But Wikipedia says Gleek was popular "from the 16th century through the 18th century," so I'm not sure how common of a game it really was at the time this book was published. Also, Wikipedia says the name "Gleek" comes from the Old French "glic" which meant "a game of cards," so I don't know if some weird mistranslation stuff was going on that somehow resulted in Pedro thinking "Gleek" was the word for card games in general without realizing it was a specific card game. I'm not sure.
I read this book about 40 years ago and had almost completely forgotten it with the passing of time. Thank you for reviving so many good memories of hilarity in my youth.
in Fawlty Towers, John Cleese's magnum opus, the Spanish waiter Manuel famously says, "I speak English well. I learn it from a book." This is clearly the book he had in mind.
One of my favorite books, called "Sky my husband", treads the same path, but deliberately. The author, one John-Wolf Whistle (actually Jean-Loup Chifflet), endeavours to litterally translate French phrases and expressions in English, while very seriously posing as the inventor of a new method to speak it easily and quickly. This "guide of the running English" is absolutely hilarious.
What does Sky my husband mean in French? I can't figure that one out.
@@davidlericain "Ciel! Mon mari" means something like "Heavens! My husband". It is a comedic trope or running gag in movies, series, comic books... It is said by an adulterous wife when her husband comes back home early while her lover is still in the house. The wife usually shouts that before trying to hide her lover in the closet or under the bed 😂
@@davidlericain "Ciel, mon mari!" said by a wife who's having a good time with her lover then hears her husband come home in an old film (I can't remember which). Translates to "Sky my husband!". Edit- spelling, must learn to proofread better.
That's it, "Ciel !" means "Good heavens!", so something like "Good heavens, my husband!"
"It's a comedic trope often associated with farcical theater and melodrama. It supposedly originated in the 19th century and became a stereotypical line in French stage plays, particularly in the genre of boulevard theater-light, fast-paced comedies about domestic misunderstandings, infidelities, and absurd situations." (Thanks ChatGPT 😁)
My absolute favorite: "Bring back your strawberry!" (ramène ta fraise) 😃😃😃
To say thank you for the copy of the book with RobNotes! Twill be an thing of large amusement in I. (My English is getting better with every page turn...) 📖🥰
Haha. Yours Englishes is to be perfect all the ready.
Thanks for your generosité, and thanks to be of the watching.
"Unhappies" is amazing
To understand the joke about Janson and “furfur” (timestamp 8:23), you need to understand that the French word for “brand” is “soon,“ and that the Latin word for “bran” is “furfur.“ So the weird sentence “the meal is better than the furfur” is just Fonseca’s fractured fumble towards “Flour is better than bran.”
Well, he managed to get the phrase "English as she is spoke" into the language.
As you can tell from the front page Rob shows at 11:17, "English As She Is Spoke" was not the original title of the book. That was a name given to it by the American publisher that reprinted it and hired Mark Twain to write a new preface.
@@GazilionPT That makes sense, but this substitute title, English As She Is Spoke, itself became a meme in English. I recall my older (much older) sister using it on me, once.
to be fair, I just assume it was a little out date. that sounds reasonably enough as like, 1700s writing.
@@janTesika I agree with this. The dialectical variations of language was not as standardized among the lowly sailors before the 18th century, as some would have you believe.
In German, sea urchins are still called sea hedgehogs.
Even in English, we tack 'sea' in front of 'sea urchin' because 'urchin' alone used to mean hedgehog. (street urchin being a poor Victorian child, of course)
Same in Spanish: "erizo" /"erizo de mar"
And seals are called sea dogs. The result of Germany being landlocked!
@@sonclearbrahman-ar1461 In Slovene, we call _sharks_ "sea dogs". Which makes even less sense.
Also, since when is Germany landlocked?
_I want to fly like a hedgehog_
_To the sea_
_Fly like a hedgehog_
_Let my spirit carry me_
9:11 Actually, the French for "idiomatic expression" is "idiotisme", so that jibes with Pedro's Portuguese-French-English mistranslation process
6:07 oh, I know! Espanglish is when characters in Spanish cartoons randomly use out-of-place English words
“An honest and upright idiot” is really the peak of what I aspire to be.
Gleek had been a popular card game in England but its heyday was in the 17th century so around 200 years before this book. However the phrase "building castles in Spain" can be found in Chaucer. Usage of this seems to have petered out in the last 60 years or so.
Damn, you beat me to the gleek correction!
I always thought it was Building castles in sand.
IIRC, Shakespeare uses "gleek" in Midsummer's Nights Dream to mean, apparently, "sing"
I don't know my Shakespeare at all, apparently. I had no idea that the word was there.
gleek to joke, to jeer, to scoff, A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM, iii. 1. 134; “gleeking,” HENRY V., v. 1. 68.
A General Glossary to Shakespeare's Works. Alexander Dyce. Boston. Dana Estes and Company. 1904.
"Gleek" was used in Mork and Mindy for a device Mork needed to recharge his life force. I wonder if this came from a previous use or they just liked the sound?
Master Yoda’s review at 13:13 … “Lacking in quality, this book may have been.”
I remember a TomTom GPS I had... once it asked me a *quadruple* negative about "am I sure I did not want to keep stopping not wanting to use expressways" or something like that. My brain locked up trying to decipher it and I nearly went through a stop sign.
Wow 😂 can’t blame you there
was that one of those voices that was intentionally confusing? had a friend who had Mr.T voice on his TomTom and it constantly told you confusing instructions lol.
This is great! It reminded me of "From a 1965 honda Manual" ...tootle the horn trumpet
to him melodiously at first. If he still obstacles your passage
tootle him with vigor . Found Poetry!
TREMENDOUS! Thank you so much for the introduction. I visited Mark Twain's birth cabin in Missouri and they had some terrific examples of his prose, this was a great addition. If I live to be 100, I'll go out with the same comet that book-ended his life.
Thank you so much for your excellent videos! As a French person (sorry), I really enjoy every second of them.
I'm originally from Montréal, Québec, 27 years ago, but an English-speaker. My wife and I humorously refer to eggnog as "chicken milk", because of "lait de poule" in French.
She's originally German. We mangle English, French, Yiddish, and German. Since we live in Florida, there's also some mangled Spanish mixed in. It's fun!
@@laripu Same here! I mean, I'm an anglophone in Montreal and the French for "eggnog" looks funny to me. But I'm sure a lot of English compounds also sound goofy to people who aren't used to them. E.g. not-very-piglike animals being called hedgehogs and guinea pigs.
@@kirsten_snoose One thing I always found funny was the word "dandelion", which comes from French "dents de lion". Makes sense. And yet the French word is "pissenlit", which is ... something else. 😆
@@laripu The French word "pissenlit" (pee the bed), does make sense, as dandelion has a diuretic effect when consumed.
@@redwing3969 Excellent information! I didn't know. Thank you for that!
I stumbled across excerpts of this book back in the 80s when I worked at a library. It took years to finally track it down (once the internet came along) but it truly is valuable his weight's gold.
This book is a Dunning-Krueger masterpiece.
I'm wondering if this book led to Monty Python's Hungarian Phrase book sketch. "My hovercraft is full of eels!"
@@enlacostaizquierdathere's no evidence but surely they knew about it
@@enlacostaizquierdaRob addresses this in his pinned comment. Look for “MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS” if you don’t see at the top of the comments. Rob says it’s unknown whether the book influenced them or not.
A frenchman is looking online for an english teacher. He calls the first one he finds:
"Bonjour, combien pour les leçons ?"
"30 euros de l'heure"
It was too expansive.
He calls a second one:
"20 euros de l'heure"
Still too expansive.
The third one:
"10 euros de l'heure !"
The price was good. It was set to meet at the tracher's flat.
The man knocks at the door, the teacher opens. The man :
"Hello! Cheap English lessons here?"
The teacher:
"If, if ! Between !"
This joke also works exactly the same for Spanish.
Very good joke
Spelling mistake: you should have written expensive
i don't get it.
@@IkarusKommt
If, if, between => Si, si, entre => Yes, yes, come in.
Haha, right up there with the guy drowning in the Seine yelling "help ! help! "....and the passerby yelling back to him saying " maybe you should have spent your money on swimming lessons instead of english lessons ." 🤔
Thank you for enriching my life. It took me less than a minute to pause your excellent video and download a copy. I'll enjoy it immensely!
One of my favorite books. A bunch of these phrases were also set to music by the band Cardiacs which is how I first found it. Listen to Cry Wet Smile Dry and Sleep All Eyes Open. Thanks for the video, Rob. :)
The two examples at 14:25 were also used directly on Tim Smith's Spratleys - Fanny!
It amuses me greatly that they were able to write coherent songs using such botched phrases!
'The Book of Heroic Failures' - Stephen Pile - introduced me to this tale, many years ago. It's a great book. Absolutely hilarious!
So happy to have "To craunch a marmoset" explained. Cheers!
I noticed "To sin in trouble water" which is a true delicacy as he made an error on the French words "Pécher" (to fish) and "Pêcher"(to sin). "Pécher en eaux troubles" means "to hang out with the wrong crowd".
Anyway those silly translations always make me laugh and I had some hilarious times translating a French text to Japanese for example and the back to French. I don't know if it's the same now with the improvement of automatic translators though...
Plus ça change, c’est la mème chose.
@dominiquebois I believe you have flipped the two spellings: pécher is to sin, pêcher is to fish. As I remember from primary school, this allows some interesting interpretations when reading the New Testament.
@@yveslafrance2806😂😂😂
Oh well spotted
@@yveslafrance2806 Yep, I flipped the accents though it's my native language. I sometimes hate them. May I add as "un pêcher" is also a peach tree in French that we could have "peach tree in trouble water" which is a fascinating sentence, isn't it ? By the way too, "avoir la pêche" is used to qualify someone healthy and dynamic so the expression "il a une pêche du tonnerre" could be word-to-word translated in "he's got a thunder's peach". Pretty confusing when you just listen at.😊
This is an amazing gem! 🤣 As a French speaker, I went through the book and tried to guess the "original" French sentences. Some were really funny and some others... I couldn't even guess what the author had in mind!
If ever you need help with French content, you can count me in. Linguistic is so fun!
For the curious ones, "These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth" was probably " Ces abricots et ses pêches me donnent l'eau à la bouche" (which refer to salivating just by looking at the food).
And my favorite: "Why you no helps me to?" 😂 Should print that one on a shirt.
What a fun video with so much detail! At the beginning of the video, I was saying, “Oh, I hope Rob goes through this book and gives us a taste of what it says!” Thank you so much for this!🙏☮️
Mark's preface is brilliant for that. Cut the heart in twain
I recall when my postillion was struck by lightning. Rough day for all.
Shocking!
Well bugger me! Both my parents used the "English as she is spoke" phrase: I grew up hearing it. But I had always thought it was just one of my mother's phrases. Hadn't realised until to-night that it was actually the name of a real book. But then again, it wasn't uncommon for either of my parents to speak Middle English; & often they'd pronounce every letter of words like "wife" & "knee" etc.
It was only when I myself was reading history that I finally realised that it wasn't just a shared 'made up' language my parents spoke when they were messing about. And I wish so much that I'd asked them how that came about: - especially as my Grandmother refused to let my mother attend Cambridge, to which she'd won a scholarship. As soon as my Grandfather died my mother was made to go and work in a sweet shop. And I had always thought my father had read Economics - not Engl. Lit.
Just one of those (many) questions one leaves it too late to ask.
I would sometimes pronounce every letter as a joke. I've wondered since if that ended up being an aid in teaching myself to spell correctly.
@@thomaswilliams2273I would expect it did - especially for short, tricky words. But, unfortunately AI tends to do that too: and completely changes the pronunciation.
Biggest bug-bear there is the word "epitome". I've now heard one or two reactors have included "eppy-tome" to their vocabulary INSTEAD of pronouncing the letters/syllable in "tome" as "toe-me": (E-pit- oh-me").Along with the made-up word "coron-ated" instead of the perfectly short and direct "crowned".🤔
It sounds like your parents were intelligent and joyous learners!
"I wish to plead incompetence, Mylord."
Hey Rob, you're fun to watch because you're good natured. It's nice to see and watch. Your videos are a bright thing to turn to! :)
On the subject of trying to speak the language
I went to Portugal last year and decided to learn a bit on Duolingo
Then, when I was there, I had all the waiters telling me not to bother because they didn't have time for all that!
Which was nice
cities are cities no matter where you go.
jobs are jobs no matter where you go.
i know i don't have time to play " help the foreigner cosplay " at my job.
service, payment, leave.
do that a hundred times in a day.
go home cry and wake up again to the capitalist hellscape.
repeat.
Same in Villamoura. Proudly ordering a cup of tea "Cha preto con..." and the lad said "Milk. Yeah fine. Cash or card?""
@@jonathanfinan722 heh, it's handy but also a shame because it takes away the chance to actually practice and learn. But such is the world
Duolingo only has Brazilian Portuguese so that probably didn’t help! 😂
Portuguese people tend to speak excellent English, which is great for travelers. I also want to note that if you do try to learn it, they will happily assist you.
And here I thought my iPhone autocorrect was based on the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook because it keeps changing “well” to “eel” at random. 😂
This is like the 19th century version of the old "all your base are belong to us" meme .
I have no chance to survive (without laughing)!
Absolutely loving this channel recently! Always been into etymology and language history, but never really looked into it. Learning so much!
"honest & upright idiot" is such a perfect Twain bar lol ❤😂 What a legend. I hope they're still teaching him vigorously throughout elementary, middle & some high school in the US
Presumably after learning of English As She Is Spoke, Twain went on to translate his story The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County into French, and then forcibly translate it back into English word by word, resulting in an entertaining, if barely comprehensible, word salad. He published all three versions of the story in a single volume titled "The Jumping Frog: In English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil".
Thanks for this, I’ll absolutely have to look it up.
@@g.w.7925same!
AHH DO DE-CLAY-HER - gotta love a good mark twain impersonation
This entire time I was thinking of a book called "make that the cat wise" which is about literal translations from Dutch. It is hilarious!
And the website .nl
My favorite litterally translatedd Dutch phrase:
That shall me a sausage be
(Dat zal mij een worst wezen, I don't care)
Fabulous video Rob! And how nice to read so many genuinely informative and interesting comments here too!
I'm now going to throw off my cornet and skate and craunch a marmoset dressed in just my patches and a sash fastened with a spindle! 😄
14:00 I'm glad Lincoln had some good laughs, they usually portray him as always totally depressed
I used to wonder why the Scots used "the day" for today. There are several examples of this sort of thing. On teaching myself Scots Gaelic I realise it's a straight translation into English. In this case "an diugh" The day although via Google is An latha.
The same happened in Ireland. The quaint characteristics of Irish English are a result of widespread direct translation when Irish Gaelic was banned, especially in public.
I am reading George MacDonald and am enjoying his Scottish words with a deal of effort.
The night is in common use in the North East fir tonight.
This reminds me of the hilarious instruction leaflet supplied with an electric iron my father bought in the 1970s, which had been imported from Czechoslovakia. The first line read "Divide the tissues according to their names."
Rob, thank you for this hilarious gem! I was roflcoptering like crazy!
Until you explained this early version of a Google translated Chinese-to-English-to-German product manual, I thought this man must have been the greatest satirical artist of his time. So fast makes him that nobody after! (Which everyone with a grasp of German will understand instantly!) "In the country of blinds" by the way might in fact have been early Google translated from German. We use exactly the same phrase.
And by the way - I did not occur to me so far that it was Mark Twain, of all writers, who pioneered the concept of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Have a great weekend!
Have a great one too. Thanks for watching.
I paused your video and bought a copy and then continued the video. Thanks for a real gem.
Exactly what I did!🎉
As a Brazilian myself, your Portuguese pronunciation was good enough
I have enjoyed all of your videos, this one though, had me laughing the entire time! I will definitely be getting the version with your notes. Thank you!
Smashing! Please to be enjoying her.
I'm french and until 5:51 I was wondering why this english feel so familiar to me ?
"he do the devil at four" sounds like the Italian saying "fare il diavolo a quattro" (to do the devil at four, or a devil multiplied for four) meaning to do the impossible in order to achieve something
I can enlighten you on two weird bits of vocab there. "Some wigs", listed under "Eatings", are a sort of bread bun or roll, flavoured with caraway that were a popular breakfast food in England into the C19. "Gleek" was an old fashioned card game so definitely belongs in Entertainments.
I've been watching your videos for ages and my wife has just started doing the same. She described you as the "Professor Brian Cox of Words" because she doesn't care about language (just like she doesn't care about space) but despite that, it somehow becomes fascinating when you're talking about it.
It is hilarious! And as soon as you said " to come water in mouth", it was obvious for my french brain that all this was probably translated from french.
"En avoir l'eau a la bouche", my mouth is watering 🤤.
I dead myself in envy : "j'en meurs d'envie", I'm dying for it ⚰️.
He is valuable his weight's gold : "il vaut son pesant d'or", it's worth its weight in gold 🏅.
To force to forge, becomes smith: "c'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron" , practice makes perfect 🗡⚒️.
To come back at their muttons : "revenir à ses moutons" (getting back to your sheep), going back to your original concerns 🐑🐏.
And last but not least, my favourite : Few, few, the bird make her nest : "petit à petit l'oiseau fait son nid", little by little, the bird makes its nest 🐦🪺.
It sounds like a 19th century version of the RUclips channel Twisted Translations, which takes English song lyrics and runs them through a variety of languages in Google Translate then back to English, with hilarious results.
I need to check that out.
now i'm imagining this being a job a few hundred years ago, translating phrases through dictionaries upon dictionaries, just to make some king laugh
@@RobWords Look up her inaugural video, singing 'Let it Go' from Frozen: ruclips.net/video/2bVAoVlFYf0/видео.html
I'd also recommend StarvHarv's Badly Translated History series, as well as when he goes through various Wikipedias originally in languages with bad Google Translation quality.
I came here to post the same comment.
Malinda, the instigator of that series eventually ended it because the gradual improvements in Google Translate, made it increasingly difficult to get humorous results. I recommend familiarizing yourself with the real lyrics to the songs before listening to the twisted ones. Cheers 👍
Love your videos Rob 👌🏼
This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch with the Hungarian-English phrase book for Tourists.
Tim Smith of the band Cardiacs used this book for many many song lyrics over the years. The song 'Sleep All Eyes Open' is a favourite.
I'll check it out, thanks.
@@RobWords Excellent, will we entice Rob into The Pond? :D (a name given to Cardiacs fans, 'look at all the little fishes in the pond' he said at gigs)
Fabulous. A little book I have grown to love. Nice to see its continued love. Merry Christmas to you and yours.