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:
- Danes: Hebrew, Volapük
- Italians: Turkish
- French: Chinese, Hebrew
- Nederlanders: Chinese
- Poles, Swedes: Greek, Chinese
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.
Strange Maps relays from Language Log a chart relating thirty languages through the equivalents of “it’s Greek to me”.