German-style adjectival phrases using Latin and English elements
I wonder why on-the-job training, at-will employment, ex-parte application, in-vitro fertilization are more usual than the better English training on the job, employment at will, application ex parte, fertilization in vitro.
I also wonder why children say me and him in the subject, leading to the odious hypercorrection he and I in the object.
still looking for a set of Elvish filters
Living languages are always changing; the most conspicuous way they change is in their sounds, and this change is generally regular — which is why it’s possible to imitate another dialect even if you’ve never heard the particular words spoken in that dialect.
Geoff’s Sound Change Applier (link updated 2018) is a swell toy. You feed it a word in the parent language, and a list of rules for changes between that and a descendant language, and SCA predicts the descendant form of that word. For a sample, Geoff includes a (crude) list of rules to transform Latin words into Castilian words. This way you can quickly test the accuracy of a given reconstruction of such changes.
Those who play at inventing languages (a sport whose most famous player was Tolkien) can use SCA to generate a whole family of languages. What fun.
According to John Ross (author of Unintended Consequences),
What Shakespeare’s character Dick the Butcher really said was “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the legislators.”
That’s a bit different suggestion, isn’t it?
Learn something every day. Philip Anderson writes in rec.heraldry:
Maria is the Latinisation of Miriam, which means something like “drop of the ocean”. But the Latin translation of this, stilla maris, was confused with stella maris, i.e. “star of the sea”, which is said to be why she is often shown with a blue robe decorated with a star.
2004 Oct 24: Now it occurs to me that the same root is in distill and in carmine Burānō: Fortune plango vulnera / stillantibus ocellis (I bewail the wounds of fortune / with dripping eyes).
from CNN: Hospital seeks Klingon speaker
“There are some cases where we’ve had mental health patients where this was all they would speak,” said the county’s purchasing administrator, Franna Hathaway.
County officials said that obligates them to respond with a Klingon-English interpreter, putting the language of starship Enterprise officer Worf and other Klingon characters on a par with common languages such as Russian and Vietnamese, and less common tongues including Dari and Tongan.
Update: Or not.
The romanceconlang list (dedicated to the design of fictional descendants of Latin, spoken presumably by people of other timelines) has lately discussed expressions parallel to “It’s Greek to me” in other languages. So far:
Later: A reader contributes:
My co-worker across the hall is Turkish. She says that, while it is not a common phrase, she thinks Turks use French as their “Greek”. The way she phrased it made me think that it was not really a Turkish idiom, but I thought you might be interested.
More generally, what does each nation use for ‘funny-foreigner-talk’? I’ve seen mock-German so used both in English (“das Komputenmachine ist nicht für fingerpoken und mittengraben”) and in French; when I asked in some newsgroup what language Germans use, one German replied that they use other varieties of German.
Laterer: Another reader (who had not previously so manifested! hi!) reports, “In Modern Hebrew, the idiom is It’s all Chinese.”
Footnote: To discourage spammers, romanceconlang was renamed romconlang in October 2003.