10 ms·
‘My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels’ in Many Languages
- egypturnash 8y agoThe fact that someone translated this into Sumerian made me laugh out loud. My brain finds strange things funny sometimes.
- basementcat 8y agoHow did they figure out how to write 'hovercraft' in Sumerian? Was there a 'Rosetta Stone' like codex describing futuristic transportation technology?
- LoSboccacc 8y agogoing by the latin translation, ancient languages are just flying + boat
- coldtea 8y agoHovercraft might be future technology, but "hover" and "craft" e.g. "vehicle that hovers" or "carriage that hovers" etc is not.
- skocznymroczny 8y agoBut that might be very Anglocentric way of translating things. For example in Polish, hovercraft is "poduszkowiec", meaning "pillower", because it has an air pillow underneath it :)
- consp 8y agoThe original Dutch word is "luchtkussenboot" (air pillow boat), but almost exclusively used in Flanders (Belgium) and the southwest of the Netherlands as the English loanword "Hovercraft" is more commonly used. So the pillow thing is more common than you think.
- Lukas_Skywalker 8y agoIn German as well (Luftkissenboot)
- k__ 8y agoOr air pillow vehicle
- hibbelig 8y ago"Luftkissenboot" is "air pillow boat". I think those who say "Luftkissenfahrzeug" ("air pillow vehicle") might also be those who say "Fernsprechhandapparat" ("long distance speech hand(held) device") instead of "Hörer" ("(phone) handset"). :-) But my favorite is "Personenvereinzelungsanlage" (people turn-into-singles device, aka turnstile). It describes very clearly what it does, but not how it does it. Whereas turnstile is silent regarding whether it works or not.
- lb1lf 8y agoSame goes for Norwegian - 'Luftputebåt' - 'luft' 'pute' båt' - 'air' 'pillow' 'boat'. Hovercraft is occasionally used, but many (most?) Norwegians would frown at this in a Norwegian-language text, as luftputebåt does the job perfectly well, thankyouverymuch. Then again, it is a word which is seldomly used as hovercraft are exceedingly rare around here - AFAIK there has been only one commercial service (incidentally, from the island I currently live on to the nearby town of Ålesund and some surrounding places) - it operated for a few months in 1965, being terminated after the craft capsized for the second time in as many months - more or less.
- icebraining 8y agoSeems like the Brazillians use "aerodeslizador", literally aero-slider.
- simias 8y agoFrench "aéroglisseur" has the same literal meaning.
- biztos 8y agoThe German and (ironically?) Hungarian translations both use "air-pillow" for the hovering part, though in German they translated it as "vehicle" and in Hungarian as "boat." Go figure. [edit] "air-pillow" is presumably meant to be read as "air-cushioned" but in both cases the actual word was "pillow"
- bhaak 8y agoIf you look at the other Germanic languages, most use either "vehicle" or "boat". As a native speaker born far away from any body of water, I would have said that you could use "Luftkissenboot" and "Luftkissenfahrzeug" interchangeably but the German Wikipedia article disagrees. "Vehicle" apparently implies that it doesn't only need to work on water.
- teamhappy 8y ago"Kissen" (German for "pillow") and "cushion" have the same origin. The old french word "cuissin", meaning "cushion for the hip" (comes from "coxa" which is "hip" in Latin). "Pillow" apparently comes from the old Germanic word "pyle" or "pylu" which is based on the Latin word "pulvinus" (meaning "cushion").
- V-2 8y agoYeah, same in Polish - it's "poduszkowiec" (pillow - "poduszka").
- Fins 8y agoSame in Russian as well, "vessel on an air-pillow".
- hailk 8y agoConversions seems freely interpreted. In Gujarati it's `હોવેરક્રાફ્ટ`, transliterates to `hovercraft`, no meaning. In Malayalam `പറക്കും-പേടകം` translates to `Flying-vehicle`. In Hindi `ṃḍarāne vālī nāv` translates to `Floating boat`. In Marathi `माझी होडी मासळयांनी भरली आहे` it just says, `My boat is full of fish`.
- klez 8y agoIn Venetian they translated it as "My boat is full of eels". We don't have a word for hovercraft. "Barchin" is actually a small personal boat. Also, happy to see they have a Venetian version :)
- fwdpropaganda 8y ago> In Venetian they translated it as "My boat is full of eels". We don't have a word for hovercraft. I would've guessed if there's a place that desperately needs hovercrafts it's Venice...
- msravi 8y agoIn Kannada, they translated hovercraft to ಯಾಂತ್ರಿಕದೋಣಿ - mechanical boat, and eel to ಹಾವುಮೀನು - snake fish.
- neeleshs 8y agoA better word probably is haarudoni
- vanderZwan 8y agoYour remark somehow caused me to fall down an internet rabbit hole. First I remembered reading a story on the internet that in Bislama, one of the official languages of the island nation of Vanuatu, the word for Helicopter is "mixmaster blong Jesus Christ". The explanation being that blades of a helicopter are like a blender, and Jesus Christ went to heaven, so "the blender that rises up to heaven". Then, before replying with that, I wondered if there actually was any proper source for that. Now, the official bislama.org website translates helicopter to "helikopta", so we already know that this is not true[0]. Also, surely a quirk like this would be mentioned on the Wikipedia page for the language, and it is not[1]. So where did the story come from? The only primary source that I have found for this claim is a story from the 1980s by Richard Shears, a journalist for the London Daily Mail[2]. > “Consequently, some people spoke French, other English. The original inhabitants adopted Bislama, a type of pidgin English. They also used a picture language that seemed to combine a bit of English and pidgin, resulting in a brassiere being described as “basket blong titty”. A toothbrush was “broom blong tut” (brush belonging to tooth), a helicopter was “Mixmaster blong Jesus Christ”. Technically, it might be the case that this was a Bislama way of describing a helicopter forty years ago. But until we get some native speakers to confirm or deny this, it sounds a bit unlikely. While this is not really evidence, the writing style also makes it sound more like made up a "haha look at the primitive natives"-story. First we get the "basket blong titty" example. Because natives don't wear bras of course, they're nudes, so they don't have a word for it. But they have baskets, and a brassiere is something to hold breasts. Hence, basket blong titty. Ha. ha. (note how of all examples they could have chosen, they zoomed in on one that involves the word "titty"). Similarly: "haha, they do not make a distinction between brooms and brushes because they are simple, so they call a toothbrush a "broom blong tut". Note: bismata.org translates "broom" as "brum", and "toothbrush" as "tutbras". Brassiere is not in their on-line dictionary yet. And then, once you follow that logic and accept that those two things might be true, 'mixmaster blong Jesus Christ' seems both outlandish and believable at once because it is both funny and conveniently fits preconceived notions of simple, primitive island natives. But why would the Vanatu people know what a blender is, but instead of saying blender make up a simple word "mixmaster"? Why would the first association be a blender, but not a boat propeller, which seems a lot more likely for an island nation? Why would they know about the story of Jesus Christ and his ascension, and make that the first association? I forwarded this little investigation to Snopes with the request to get to the bottom of this and either fully debunk it or, in the unlikely case that it is/was true, confirm it. [0] http://www.bislama.org/translate http://www.bislama.org/translate [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bislama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bislama [2] https://nursemyra.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/mixmaster-blong-jesus-christ/ https://nursemyra.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/mixmaster-blong-j...
- masteruvpuppetz 8y agoFork!! no Urdu?
- fahadkhan 8y agoThere's a invitation to contact the author with additions at the bottom of the page. I would if I knew what eel and hovercraft are in Urdu.
- masteruvpuppetz 8y agoidk!! "machli" and "hawai kashti" would do
- fahadkhan 8y agoMachli (fish) is too generic, I think. "Hawai kashti" is probably right. I don't know if it's in use. Most likely the word is Hovercraft.
- mncharity 8y agoہوور کرافٹ (hovercraft) or اے سی وی (ACV)? Source: http://advancepakistan.com/2017/09/20/hovercraft/ http://advancepakistan.com/2017/09/20/hovercraft/ . Google translate works on both, but translates "hovercraft" as ہورچرک . The source was found by looking up the most common Urdu word (کے), and googling for "کے hovercraft".
- exabrial 8y agoI spit my milk out on the Scottish one
- jwilk 8y agoDo you mean Scots or Scottish Gaelic?
- ryan-allen 8y agoI'm guessing they meant Scots, there are some variations: Ma hovercraft's full o eels Ma hovercraft's lippin-fou wi eels Ma hovercraft's lippit wi eels Ma hovercraft's breemin' ower wi eels See ma hovercraft? See eels? Hit's pure hoachin wi them.
- exabrial 8y agoI just imagine the TF2 guy saying this
- coldcode 8y agoOr Willie from the Simpsons
- ryan-allen 8y agoOn the site I discovered today they have audio recordings of lots of the sayings, and all of the Scots translations have them!
- tylerhou 8y agoThe Latin is somewhat awkward: > Mea navis volitans anguillis plena est This is technically correct, but `anguillis` generally should be in the genitive case "anguillarum" for classical Latin - that is, "full 'of' eels", instead of the ablative which is used here, "full 'by means of/with respect to' eels". > Navis volitans mihi anguillis plena est The same criticism for `anguillis` applies here. Also, the usage of the dative of possession (mihi) is non-standard because it is usually reserved when you want to emphasize that a person has possession: "nomen mihi est Bob" -- "my name is Bob". The fact that I have a hovercraft isn't really the focus of the sentence - the fact that it is full of eels is far more interesting. It's not technically wrong, but I don't think any Roman would translate this sentence this way.
- pfortuny 8y agoAFAIK plenus requires an ablative: like in “gratia plena” (full of grace), “pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua” (heavens and earth are full of your glory) etc...
- rileyphone 8y agoThe Wiktionary page for plenūs states it moved from the genitive to the ablative in later Latin (eg liturgical), so it seems your both right!
- tylerhou 8y agoPlenus can take an ablative (cf. Allen and Greenough, §409a) but it can also take an objective genitive (cf. §349a). I'm pretty sure the objective genitive is preferred (at least in poetry, according to A&G), but I could be wrong. Allen and Greenough: https://books.google.com/books/about/Allen_and_Greenough_s_New_Latin_Grammar.html?id=g41fAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books/about/Allen_and_Greenough_s_N..., see pages 216-217 (§349a) and 256 (§409a).
- al2o3cr 8y ago"people called Romanes they go to the house??"
- singingfish 8y agothis is my go to page for testing unicode stuff :)
- ekke 8y agoThis is HN after all - some version of ES/JS: class Eel { valueOf () { return 'https://imgflip.com/meme/Bad-Joke-Eel'; } } const craftCapacity = 331, hovercraft = Array.from(Array(craftCapacity), () => new Eel);
- Klathmon 8y agoIt's "My hovercraft is full of eels", not "My hovercraft has an arbitrary amount of eels in it"! Now looking at the ES5 spec [0], the max length of an array is an unsigned 32-bit integer due to the `ToUint32` operation that the spec defines. So that means our `craftCapacity` here needs to be 2^32-1 Sadly we can't use `Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER` here because that assumes double-precision floating points as the underlying storage method, so we just have to hardcode our value: const hovercraft = Array(4294967295).map(() => 'https://imgflip.com/meme/Bad-Joke-Eel') [0] While the spec says this in a roundabout way, i'm not sure if any implementations actually adhere to this limit, and i'd guess most convert the array to a hashtable internally long before it gets to that size.
- bebe3000 8y agoekke assumed the hovercraft can hold at most 331 eels. You assumed it holds 4 billion eels. Who's right? I don't know but a billion eels sounds far off.
- pjmlp 8y agoMirandese > L miu hobercraft stá cheno d'anguias
- petecox 8y agoIt's interesting that a number of Romance languages, but notably not Spanish or French, prefix the subject pronoun (my) with a definite article. The-my-hovercraft
- iopq 8y agoEs el mio is perfectly good Spanish
- pjmlp 8y agoYep, I guess we could change > Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas to > El mio aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas And > Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles to > L'aéroglisseur a moi est plein d'anguilles Spanish and French natives feel free to correct me. :) EDIT: Thanks for the corrections.
- dragonwriter 8y agoNot a native, but the Spanish version sounds wrong; I've heard em “el mio” used as a noun phrase , but not as a modifier for another noun, so “El mio aerodeslizador” sounds awkward. But maybe it's okay.
- grimborg 8y agoMi is pretty much "my", and "mío" is close to "mine". "Mi aerodeslizador" is correct, and "El mío aerodeslizador" is as awkward as "Mine hovecraft". Source: I'm a native Spanish speaker.
- YaxelPerez 8y agoIn Spanish I think "El aerodeslizador mío" would sound better.
- 8y ago
- nanis 8y agoThe Turkish translation (rather than word substitution) would be: "Hoverkraftımı mürenler (or just müren) bastı".
- yantrams 8y agoThis got me thinking about what an appropriate word for hovercraft in Sanskrit could be. Sarva-Madhyama-Plavaka maybe? Translates to something that jumps/glides over all media. Edits: Grammar
- monster_group 8y agoWouldn't प्लवयानम् be sufficient (literally translates to hover-vehicle)? Full sentence would be मम प्लवयानं जलव्यालैः सम्मर्दम्।
- Ritsuko_akagi 8y agojuts wanted to say eel is called as kucia "কুচিয়া" in assamese but the page says eel.
- coldcode 8y agoSadly no pronunciation of the Romulan "Arham rrh'eilln selae'enh ihircrycae'eri nnea drihaen'in'hhuien"
- jdmichal 8y ago/a.ɾʰam r̩ʰ.eɪ.l̩n sɛ.le.ɛɲ i.hir.kɾɪ.ke.ɛ.ɾi nːɛ.a dɾi.hen.in.xuɪ.ɛn/ This is put together using the pronunciation guide present on rihan.org, which does not list IPA. So take this as a very rough attempt.
- taserian 8y agoI've always wanted a page where it would have the translation of "I'm sorry, but I don't speak a word of X" in perfectly enunciated X for all X in [Languages]. I guess this is the next best thing.
- Tephlon 8y agoOne of my favourite things to do is say "I'm sorry, I don't speak any French" in perfect French (According to an actual French person). "Desolée, Je ne parle pas Français"
- neelkadia 8y agoWhere is Sanskrit!!!?
- pimlottc 8y agoThose of a certain age may remember a similar project by Ethan Mollick on what Wikipedia adorably calls the “early web” in which the phrase was “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me”. > The Project is based on the idea that people in a foreign country have an irresistable urge to try to say something in the indigenous tongue. In most cases, however, the best a person can do is "Where is the bathroom?" a phrase that marks them as a tourist. But, if one says "I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me," you will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect. https://web.archive.org/web/20040201212958/http://hcs.harvard.edu/~igp/glass.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040201212958/http://hcs.harvar... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass
- Balgair 8y ago> > But, if one says "I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me," you will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect. Thanks, now my coffee is all over my desk. ;)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- AlphaWeaver 8y agoI enjoyed the conlangs section. It has Klingon, Toki pona, Esperanto, and more!
- alistoriv 8y agoHappy to see a Welsh translation, but I'm interested where the word for hovercraft came from. The hofren part comes from hofran (which is just a borrowing of hover), but what about fad?
- richardpetersen 8y agoIf I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?
- Balgair 8y agoThe Maori translation is a bit off, as it says that the (poorly translated) hovercraft is made with a peak amount of eel (not plural). It seems a fair number of these translations do not connotate that the hovercraft is filled with eels (plural) but rather that it is an eel (singular) that is taking up a lot of room in the hovercraft. In general, if you go to google translate, you'll see that this phrase is not well translated. Hovercraft is a tough one in general, and some languages don't have an eel in their vocab. Still, it shows that text translation is not very easy, as environment, persons speaking, and context really matter.
- kaycebasques 8y agoI wish that this site also translated the translations back into English, similar to what many people are doing in this thread.
- talonx 8y agoA lot of Indian language translations are a bit off. I wonder how many others that I don't know myself are too?
- xelxebar 8y agoThe Japanese is also awkward. The recording is also extremely non-native.
- zokier 8y agoThe Finnish translation, while very much correct, feels bit archaic; I think at least in casual contexts most people would use the form "Minun ilmatyynyalus on täynnä ankeriaita" The Northern Sámi translation feels wrong, although its grammar never was my strong points I think more correct form would be "Mu áibmofanas lea dievva ággarasaid"; I think the English translation of "Mu áibmofatnasis lea dievva ággarasaid" would roughly be "My hovercraft has full (of) eels"
- posterboy 8y ago> My hovercraft has full (of) eels that wouldn't even surprise me because e.g. French has similar idioms, "il'y'a" ''there is'', literally ''it there has'' (though 'y' is probably not even a word on it's own, ''there is close eough'').
- _bxg1 8y agoI'm so glad they have Quenya.
- flyingcircus3 8y agoSometimes I wonder if hackernews has become a reliable training ground for nascent neural networks. This thread of comments perfectly follows the trend of "the best way to find the right answer is to put a bunch of wrong answers on the internet, and just let those hairsplitters sort this out." I wonder if there were a method by which we could falseify such a hypothesis, and simply check other social media for it's reverberations of falsehoods we intentionally plant, like how organized crime traces down their bugs, er, rats, er leakers, that's the word. Or how a fast Fourier transform looks at a periodic signal, and deduces the component frequencies. It's probably just a pipe dream though. And we all know there isn't just this series of tubes lying around for us to practice on.
- Angostura 8y agoMy nipples explode with delight.