Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
Test your vocab
Apparently I know about 37,500 words, placing me just short of the 95th percentile for native English speakers. Excellent!
Try it out for yourself. For Science!
(Seriously. They need the data)
The Fable of the Ships
(After 8 rounds of translation)
A newly wed Bride went to visit a Wizard.
“Why do we call down the stars upon our ships?” she asked
“We put the stars on our great sails as lanterns to guide our ships to safe harbour” he answered.
“What about those that sink?” she asked
“When an evil sorceror climbs to a high point to cast a spell, he throws a burning brand into the sea” explained the wizard
“Can this magic only be done at night?” asked the Bride
“If I had only a little more knowledge I would turn you into a frog!” answered the Wizard
“That would be good” said the Bride
The Great Fleet
(Original Text)
A young girl was speaking with her Great-Father.
“Why do we call the stars the Great Fleet?”
“The stars are the mast-lanterns of the Great-Parents. They shine in the night to guide our spirits home.”
“And what of falling stars?”
“Sometimes when one of the Great-Parents climbs the mast to light the lantern they drop their taper and it falls into the ocean.”
“Then why don’t falling stars appear only at dusk?”
“Don’t be too clever little one, or the Great-Parents will turn you into a seal-pup!”
“I’ll be good!”
Penitet me.
Vide equus meus. Mirum est equum! Degustabis equus meus…
Sicut fructus uva passa gustat!
Quam cum iubis fit equum demulceri volatilis apparatus. Transfiguration Et vice versa cum trahitur phallus!
Obscena quod!
Ita putas? Non ego te certiorem unde fetus facta est sucus. Sucis dulcus. Sucis dulcus. Sucis dulcus. Sucis dulcus!
Adepto in equum et ducam per totum mundum et ceteris omnibus!
Corrigendus est me vobis. Totum continetur totius mundi…
Mulier taceat! Adepto in meus equum!
Skeletal clothes horses perhaps?
From a comment on WA Today…
His talents are unmatchable against a mojority of the pathetic excuses for actors and skelator close horses labeled as “actresses”.
Skelator Close Horses!? Now there’s a name for a band if I ever heard one!
Maybe my opinion of journalists is a bit harsh
I can’t tell if this is a case of a journalist being rather clever, or a journalist being an idiot and backing into cleverness (‘pulling a Homer’ as it were).
Yesterday there was bit of a scare in London when a police training exercise involving an entirely fictional gunman running up and down Oxford Street somehow leaked out into the Twittersphere as warnings of a real gunman running up and down Oxford Street. An article on one of the news sites I peruse (I can’t remember which one, and frankly I don’t care enough to go back and try and track it down) reported on this situation, including a comment about “the illusive gunman”.
At first I assumed that this was a typically (typical for Australian online news sites anyway) illiterate misspelling of “elusive”. But as it turns out “illusive” is that rarest of things – an English word with which I’m unfamiliar! It means “illusionary” or “imaginary”, and is hence a perfect description of the gunman in this case.
So, did the author pick the word deliberately, or simply mean “elusive” and fall backwards into brilliance? I guess we’ll never know (and they’d hardly admit it if they did :))
Please consider…
Please consider…
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| The Elephant of Celebes | The Celibate of Epesus |
Now get lost. I’m not going to post anything more until next year.
😉
From the Latin
I came up with a new word today – Sterculient. It’s an adjective that means “not very good” 😉
I’m having a rather rough time of it at the moment with the old depression and anxiety – hence the lack of updates. In fact I ended up at the emergency department the other night getting my heart checked out (as I suspected my heart is as strong as ever and the sudden burst of agonising chest pains I experienced was nothing but stress – but I figured I should get it checked out because I wouldn’t be able to sleep otherwise from wondering if I was actually going to wake up).
Only a few working days left until Christmas though, and then a glorious two weeks off, so I should be OK. Eventually.
Grammar
Partys is not a word. Parties is a word. Party’s and Parties’ are words. But Partys is not a word.
(OK, yes it could be a proper noun, but anything can be a proper noun. Mxyzptlk is a proper noun for crying out loud! Proper nouns don’t count 🙂 )
The Swedish Electropop Lyrical Massacree
In my oh-so-inflated opinion one of the best songs (not to mention video clips) of the last few years was Det Snurrar i min Skalle by Swedish electro-popsters Familjen. It’s a great track with only one problem – it’s in Swedish.
(Or more accurately, a dialect of Swedish the name of which temporarily escapes me..)
Now this isn’t really a problem. The song is what it is and works wonderfully even if monolingual ignoramuses such as myself can’t understand the words. But what if we want to sing along? Or for that matter simply want to know what the song is about?
Sure, you can look up a translation, but a straight translation of lyrics is never very inspiring. There’s no meter, there’s no rhyme and there’s bound to be some odd turns of phrase that sound fine in the original but are just weird when dragged kicking and screaming into another language. What you need is a more nuanced translation that takes the meaning of the lyrics and whacks it into something that would pass muster as a lyric in the new language. So where can you find such a thing for Det Snurrar i min Skalle? Well as far as I could figure out, nowhere. So I wrote my own.
This kind of work is always subjective. The translator (ie: me) has to try and balance their best guess at what the writer was trying to say with the needs of meter, rhyme and rhythm. The lyrics below are about 75%-80% accurate to my interpretation of the translations that I’ve come across, which isn’t too bad for a Sunday afternoon.
So, enjoy…
Ringing in My Head
(A probably fairly dodgy translation of Familjen’s Det Snurrar i min Skalle)
I, caught a little fire from you,
And now through my head it’s burning,
I, know what you’re about to do,
And it feels like the first time,
Let’s, show the world it’s you and me,
We’ll run to where they can’t find,
They, know that this was meant to be,
Can’t you hear them singing?
Just, as if it always had been planned,
Just like how the earth keeps spinning,
How, could you ever choose another’s hand?
You couldn’t, that’s the glory,
You, fill my head to overflow,
And I’m here to tell that story,
More, than I thought I’d ever know,
Inside my head it’s ringing,
I, caught a little fire from you,
And now through my head it’s burning,
I, know what you’re about to do,
And it feels like the first time,
Let’s, show the world it’s you and me,
We’ll run to where they can’t find,
They, know that this was meant to be,
Can’t you hear them singing?
Yeah, can’t you hear them singing?
Yeah, can’t you hear them singing?
Can’t you hear them singing?
Can’t you hear them singing?
Can’t you hear them singing?
Can’t you hear them singing?
There are limits to what you can do with Higgins.
Exciting news from the world of linguistics. Apparently speakers of Koro have finally been located in (of all places) India!
Koro of course is one of the Moundsbar languages, as extensively researched by Metalleus. To quote from his classic essay Moundsbar Connections.
Turning to Moundsbar, there are at least three languages related to it, Aro, Sorno and Koro. Aro is spoken by a few hundred souls in an enclave in the “Fan” district of Richmond, Virginia; Sorno has been extinct since the third century but was spoken on Guam and Saipan in the last years of the Roman Empire, though you would never know it from Roman history; no speakers of Koro have been located but a Koro language must be hypothesized to account for certain telegrams received through the years by the Moundsbarians which they were unable to read.
It now appears that these telegrams were sent from the East Kameng district of Arunchal Pradesh in India. Take that Higgins!
As the great Metalleus himself once said, in these seas of ignorance, science splashes on.
