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How a Portuguese-To-English Phrasebook Became a Cult Comedy Sensation
- zeveb 10y agoI actually feel sorry for poor Pedro Carolino — he obviously put a lot of work into his little book (even if it was horribly misguided), and people have been laughing at it for over a century!
- nicolas_t 10y agoTrue but at least his work is not forgotten.
- jimmytidey 10y agoThey link through to the book itself, I am crying with laughter. http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884/ http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-is-... One of my favourites: under 'games' is listed 'carousal', word that I hope to use daily from now on.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI started laughing hysterically at, "A deaf." "Oh I say there Bart, is that a deaf I see? Why bless the fat of my leg!"
- schoen 10y agoIt definitely sounds silly in English, but it's still idiomatic Portuguese today ("um surdo"). My hypothesis about this is that Portuguese has preserved some of the Latin tendency to allow arbitrary adjectives to be used as substantives (nouns). In Latin you can do this with any adjective in any context to refer to a person or thing with the specified characteristic (so "laetus" 'happy' could also mean 'a happy person', "tristis" 'sad' could also mean 'a sad person'; compare the motto of Kansas, "ad astra per aspera", which uses the adjective "aspera" as a substantive meaning 'difficult (things)'). In Portuguese you can find many adjectives that can be used in an identical form as substantives -- certainly not always, but seemingly more often than in English.
- oblio 10y agoYou're probably right. Romanian has the same thing.
- riffraff 10y agountil now, I would have thought this was correct english -_-.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoNo shame there, I'm sure you speak English far better than I do whichever language is native to you. Now, if you decided to publish a phrase book based on your current knowledge, then we'd be having a bit of a laugh.
- evincarofautumn 10y agoIt’s a common error among English learners, particularly when it comes to nationalities. We would say “I am French” or “I am a French person”, but never “I am a French”.
- dghf 10y agoMade even more confusing that you can do it with some nationalities but not others. So "a French" is out, but most nationalities ending "-an" are OK: an American, a German, an Afghan, a Norwegian, a Russian, an Italian. Also "-ese", though with something of an archaic air: a Chinese, a Maltese, a Portugese. Also a Swiss, an Argentine, an Israeli, because why not? And of course pretty much any adjective can be used as a plural noun with the definite article: the French, the Dutch, the beautiful and the damned, the quick and the dead, etc.
- elros 10y agoWhat's more, some nationalities have specific nouns for them, but not all. A Spanish person is a Spaniard, a Finnish person is a Finn, but a German person isn't a Germ. Then there are those that fell out of use. There are Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, but never Chinamen!
- lasfter 10y agoMy favourite is "The Coochmann", under Servants.
- ggambetta 10y agoInterestingly, although I speak no Portuguese or French, I can sort of understand some of the sayings, by mentally translating them back in a literal way to Spanish. For example "Few few the bird make her nest" probably means "Bit by bit a bird builds a nest". "A horse baared don't look him in the tooth" is probably "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth", via the Spanish version "A caballo regalado no se le miran los dientes". I can probably make sense of half of them. The other half are hilariously mangled beyond recognition :)
- marcosdumay 10y agoI do speak Portuguese, and a bit of French. I still have no idea how "tooth" become singular in that phrase.
- tangus 10y ago“A cavallo dado não se lhe olha para o dente.”
- icebraining 10y agoIt's actually rather common, at least in certain areas: https://ciberduvidas.iscte-iul.pt/consultorio/perguntas/a-cavalo-dado-nao-se-olha-osao-dentes/31406 https://ciberduvidas.iscte-iul.pt/consultorio/perguntas/a-ca... http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1994/7/09/brasil/21.html http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1994/7/09/brasil/21.html
- microtherion 10y agoSome of the proverbs seem to have French origin, e.g. nothing some money, nothing of Swiss is a bad translation of Point d’argent, point de Suisse (No money, no Swiss [mercenaries]).
- ggambetta 10y agoOoh, interesting. Never heard that one before.
- Turing_Machine 10y agoDefinitely a classic. I've been using "spits in the coat" for a long time, e.g. "[local coffee roaster] spits in Starbucks' coat." You can play a related game with Google Translate. Start with a phrase in say, English, then translate to, say, Chinese, then Russian, then... and finally back to English. The results are often amusing, and generally become more bizarre the more languages there are in the intervening chain. Going back and forth with non-Indo-European languages seems to make the phrase diverge from its original semantics more quickly.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y agoFake. Not a totally bad fake, but many of the manglings are wrong. For instance (p.58) "In the country of the blinds" should be "In land of blinds", and no plural in man or king either. No "Castles in Spain", either, it's "castles in the clouds". Might be the work of a bored Englishman ...
- Colex 10y agoThat's quite a conclusion you've reached with such little information. One of the points stated is that it might have been translated to French and then English, but not information on what exact dictionary might have been used. A lot of dictionaries will, though, give you a lot of possible translations for the same word, that combined with the necessity of grammatically putting them together could create such a messy non-sensical work... or it could be fake, who knows.
- sbmassey 10y agoYou should update the Wikipedia article with your findings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago"Original research" is banned.
- iopq 10y agoThis isn't original research anymore, since there's a Hacker News source. You can link to this thread as proof.
- igravious 10y agoIndeed. Say you want to change Wikipedia to better reflect your whims and opinions. (1) Post your notions on Hacker News. (2) Cite the HN comment from Wikipedia. I'm not recommending people do this, I'm just saying you could.
- to3m 10y agoI submit that a work of art with "a legacy that has lasted centuries" should be more than ~1.6 of them old - no matter how little I can deny that 1.6 or so is indeed enough to qualify for the plural.
- khedoros 10y ago"How many centuries, did you say?" "0.01 centuries."
- jventura 10y agoAs a native (Portuguese) speaker I completely understand why something like this may have appeared! You must understand that we have such a small country and few foreigners bother to learn our language, even when they come to visit us. As we are a very nice bunch of people (we are, even our political revolution was made with carnation flowers [quite similar to roses], not a single bullet was shot), and we are very proud of having the oldest stable borders of all Europe (since 1180 or something like that), we are proud to be able to provide our visitors with the best possible experience. Therefore, if you don't learn our language, we must try to communicate with you in other ways! You see, we don't want foreigners to make fools out of themselves. I'll give you an example: we cook almost every part of the pork, even the pork's balls, so we don't want you to eat "tubaros" (pork's "balls") without you knowing it. we also cook the intestines (bucho), so we want you to be prepared for the experience (put some lemon). On a more serious note (although I'm speaking some truth above), if you only know a very small subset of the english vocabulary, you have to be creative. So you have to speak in English as you would do in Portuguese. Unfortunately it doesn't help that the english language sometimes mixes the verb and the predicate(?) (from our perspective, of course). An example: - João - John - é - is - tipo - guy - porreiro - nice So "O João é um tipo porreiro" translates directly to "The John is a guy nice". Then, when you translate "to the letter" local proverbs such as "Quem tem língua vai a Roma", you start getting stupid things like "With a tongue one go to Rome" which in fact means something like "He who as a tongue can go to Rome" (meaning that anyone who can speak [has a tongue] can ask for directions). All in all, in the end we just don't want our visitors to eat something they'll regret later!
- mikeash 10y ago"He who has a tongue can go to Rome." I love this. I'd like to update it for the modern age. "He who has a phone can look up Rome."
- marcosdumay 10y agoHe who has a GPS can go down the cliff?
- IIAOPSW 10y ago
- ryancnelson 10y agoSome of the funniest (Brasilian) Portuguese misunderstandings I've encountered were due to differences in how some letters are pronounced. A leading hard "R" is often pronounced like an American "H". An "OU" is sometimes pronounced like an American "ooo". Once, at a trade show in Sao Paulo, I witnessed an unfortunate network technician trying to debug our _ROUTERS_ tell our (female) director of I.T. to please accept this ethernet-crossover cable and "put it between your hooters". fun times.
- petecox 10y agoIn my part of the Commonwealth, 'route' does rhyme with 'hoot'. "If you go that route, you'll get stuck in traffic". It's only in a computing context that 'router' rhymes with 'doubter'. I'd suggest female staff would likewise get the wrong idea if one pronounced it 'rooter'.
- anoother 10y agoI thought the 'rowter' pronunciation re. computing was a purely American influence. In the UK at least, router (in a computing context) _does_ rhyme with hooter. It is, after all, something that routes traffic -- exactly like your first example. A router pronounced 'rowter', on the other hand, is a device for cutting grooves in wood.
- Jedd 10y agoWhen you use the string 'row' to describe pronunciation, are you using it in the sense of 'to row a boat', or 'to get into a row with someone'?
- prodigal_erik 10y agoAmericans rhyme "route" (path) with "doubt" and "row" (paddle a boat) with "dough". If you are rhyming "row" (fight) with "cow", that's a word most Americans don't know.
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoIt just begs to be a chatbot.
- jgw 10y agoI really like: "A bad arrangement is better than a process." I might surreptitiously slip that into the next coding style guide I come across.
- NEDM64 10y agoTranslating back to Portuguese could be "alum mau arranjo é melhor que um processo". Which can be translated to "
- schoen 10y agoThe rest of your comment got lost as a duplicate; just to make sure other people see it, what you wrote below was this: > ... "um mau arranjo é melhor que um processo". > > Which can be translated to "a bad deal is still better than a lawsuit". > > Oh so Portuguese...
- NEDM64 10y agoTranslating back to Portuguese could be "um mau arranjo é melhor que um processo". Which can be translated to "a bad deal is still better than a lawsuit". Oh so Portuguese...
- ufo 10y agoIn portuguese, processo is the word for both "process" and "lawsuit".
- analog31 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 10y agoMy hovercraft is full of eels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao
- tvst 10y agoReminds me of Millor Fernandes's "The cow went to the swamp — A vaca foi pro brejo", which is a book of Brazilian Portuguese sayings translated literally to English. Pretty amusing. https://www.amazon.com/cow-went-swamp-English-Portuguese/dp/8510325162 https://www.amazon.com/cow-went-swamp-English-Portuguese/dp/...
- gcb0 10y agothis is how i see 99% of instructional YouTube videos
- nicolas_t 10y agoI'd like to find a version of the book that includes the Portuguese. The public domain version doesn't and only has the English...
- tangus 10y agoThe original is here: https://archive.org/details/onovoguiadaconve00fons https://archive.org/details/onovoguiadaconve00fons The English version seems to be a selection of the funniest parts.
- sorokod 10y agoGood source of passphrases.
- henrik_w 10y agoHa ha, this reminds me of a Madonna interview in English, translated to Hungarian, then back to English. Unfortunately it was fake, but nonetheless pretty funny. Sample: "I am a woman and not a test-mouse! Carlos is an everyday person who is in the orbit of a star who is being muscle-trained by him, not a sex machine." http://www.snopes.com/humor/misxlate/madonna.asp http://www.snopes.com/humor/misxlate/madonna.asp
- Mz 10y agoIt is presumed that Carolino wrote the book through the aid of a Portuguese-to-French dictionary and a French-to-English dictionary, using the former for an initial translation of a word or phrase from Portuguese, and the latter to convert it from French into English. The result, of course, is a mishmash of cloudy gibberish. Similarly, my sons watched a hilarious Let's Play of some game that had been translated too many times and had somehow ended up using the F word to mean something like "put in." So, every time you acquired an item, the game follows this formula: "(Character name)! (item name) bag fuck" So in the LP an early example is "Terry! drug bag fuck"
- colanderman 10y agoYou are thinking of Pokemon Crystal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ_bhwCgtXg&list=PL197CF501757AB521 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ_bhwCgtXg&list=PL197CF5017...
- hamilyon2 10y agoSo AYBABTU-style memes are much older than anyone thought. There is nothing new under the sun.
- syastrov 10y ago"a left handed": listed under "Defects of the body" Under "Quadruped's beasts": "Dragon".
- kinow 10y agoCreated https://speaklikeabrazilian.com https://speaklikeabrazilian.com to help an Irish friend in Brazil to get used to expressions that would be literally translated as "cucumber" or "to put up a tent" but that have a completely different meaning.