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Ladle Rat Rotten Hut (1940)
- gwern 4y agoFor those who don't get it, you need to listen to the audio. The idea is that this is "Little Red Riding Hood", but written in other English words which have the same rhythm/intonation but not the same phonetic sound otherwise ('ladle' is not a homonym of 'little', it just has the same stress on the first sound); after a while, it will start to make sense.
- jeroenhd 4y agoThis is also explained in the footer, though confused readers might not reach it: What's Going On? This story, believe it or not, is the very familiar fable of Little Red Riding Hood. This curious version was written in 1940 by a professor of French named H. L. Chace, who wanted to show his students that intonation - that is, the melody of a language - is an integral part of its meaning. The words here are all common English words, but not the ones you'd expect to tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
- rob74 4y agoAfter reading the explanation, I was able to decode at least the first sentence: "Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage" -> "Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived with her mother in a little cottage"
- thaumasiotes 4y agoH. L. Chace seems to have been a nonrhotic speaker.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoIf you do the Swedish Chef accent while reading this it makes it easier to understand.
- anamexis 4y agoI actually find it easier to decipher from the written version, rather than the audio.
- marktolson 4y agoI think it also depends on the accent you read this in. The Australian accent makes this very difficult to decipher. The audio sounds much closer to the original.
- jeffparsons 4y agoThis Aussie thanks you. I equipped my best-worst "deep south" accent and it suddenly all makes sense.
- dekhn 4y agoYou mean, like Mairzy Doats?
- classichasclass 4y agoThis reminds me of the seminal work of Australian dialectical analysis, Let Stalk Strine.
- JasonFruit 4y agoThe worst English teacher I ever had assigned us this to read, and then seemingly expected us to honor him for his cleverness. I did not find it clever then and do not find it clever now.
- kbutler 4y agoI find it a delightful bit of whimsy and am sorry you can't enjoy it.
- jagged-chisel 4y agoIs cleverness the intent?
- JasonFruit 4y agoNot the original intent, I don't think.
- Noumenon72 4y agoOptical illusions are sometimes clever, but their main function is to help you understand your perception by seeing the shortcuts it relies on. This essay is an auditory illusion to help illustrate that the words that are said may not be the ones you hear. I first saw it as a handout for missionaries going to foreign fields to help them focus on learning oral and not just written language.
- sumy23 4y agoTo me it perfectly illustrates that the words that are said are in fact the words you hear.
- Noumenon72 4y agoDid you read it to yourself maybe? I had a stranger read it to me so it sounded like a strange accent. Kind of like Magic Eye, I did perceive both the illusion and the fakeness of it at the same time. But it definitely did not feel like telling Siri to read the list * ladle * rat * rotten * hut
- wanderingstan 4y agoThis is from the old book “Anguish Languish” (“English Language”) The entire book is on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64432/64432-h/64432-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64432/64432-h/64432-h.htm Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish_Languish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish_Languish My uncle, a pastor, would read these with incredible intonation before bedtime at family reunions. We kids would laugh so hard at this version of “Home on the Range” HORMONE DERANGE O gummier hum warder buffer-lore rum Enter dare enter envelopes ply, Ware soiled’em assured adage cur-itching ward An disguise earn it clotty oil die. Harm, hormone derange, Warder dare enter envelopes ply, Ware soiled’em assured adage cur-itching ward An disguise earn it clotty oil die. A machine learning friend started on a prolog program to “translate” English into “Anguish Languish”, but didn’t get to far.
- OJFord 4y agoI read your comment before the submission, and was surprised the author was American with no apparent British connection - it seems to fit so well with certain niche regional accents, of the kind you might expect an American (as an English-speaking (but) foreigner) to struggle to comprehend. Then I listened to the audio at the submitted link - it works just as well, but so differently. That just makes it even more fascinating to me.
- colanderman 4y agoTo me as an American, the GP's lyrics read as a heavy Western drawl (befitting the song). Strong dipthongs and rhotacized vowels.
- mikelevins 4y agoWalt Kelly, in the great comic strip Pogo, did quite a lot of this kind of thing, from writing short snippets of dialog (for example, when the French skunk, Mamselle Hepzibah asked the turtle to play "Fly Tough Zee Bumbly Beans" on his lute) to extended songs and poems (for example, the multiple verses of the "Crispness" carol, "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie"). Sometimes the substitutions he made were commentaries on social or political or cultural topics. Sometimes they were just bits of silliness. I grew up reading the strip from before I went to school. My whole family loved it. I passed the game of "anguish languish" down to my kids, too. On long drives we sometimes took turns inventing mangled verses of familiar songs or poems. Naturally, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut is an old favorite.
- yellowapple 4y agoI think I understand Dutch now.
- ericbarrett 4y agoDutch conversation at a distance sounds close enough to English that I have great difficulty telling them apart.
- lproven 4y ago“Dutch sounds like nothing so much as a peculiar version of English (…) We would be walking down the street when a stranger would step from the shadows and say ‘Hello, sailors, care to grease my flanks?’’ or something, and all he would want was a light for his cigarette. It was disconcerting. I found this again when I presented myself at a small hotel on Prinsengracht and asked the kind-faced proprietor if he had a single room. ‘Oh, I don’t believe so’, he said (in English), ‘but let me check with my wife.’ He thrust his head through a doorway of beaded curtains and called, ‘Marta, what stirs in your leggings? Are you most moist?’ From the back a voice bellowed, ‘No, but I tingle when I squirt.’ ‘Are you of assorted odours?’ ‘Yes, of beans and sputum.’ ‘And what of your pits – do they exude sweetness?’ ‘Truly.’ ‘Shall I suck them at eventide?’ ‘Most heartily!’ He returned to me wearing a sad look: ‘I’m sorry, I thought there might have been a cancellation, but unfortunately not.’ “ — Bill Bryson, Neither here nor there: Travels in Europe.
- IncRnd 4y agoLorem Ipsum. This must have been a labor of love to produce.
- seryoiupfurds 4y agoHere's one that's interlingual! Un petit d'un petit S'étonne aux Halles Un petit d'un petit Ah! degrés te fallent Indolent qui ne sort cesse Indolent qui ne se mène Qu'importe un petit d'un petit Tout Gai de Reguennes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures
- blakewatson 4y agoThere is a party game based on this principle. Mad Gab.
- csours 4y agoReminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 and https://www.tiktok.com/@mryang_english https://www.tiktok.com/@mryang_english
- Lio 4y agoThat's exactly the link I was about to post! Adriano Celentano is a genius. :D I love the idea that languages have a certain phonetic sound even if you can't understand them. To me the original article read like someone speaking English with a heavy Dutch accent. Sometimes when I watch foreign, to me, Dutch language TV if I sort of "squint" I think I can understand it. That might just be though that Dutch is close to English and that I watch a lot of Belgian cycling events so know the subject a bit.
- jweather 4y agoSimilarly: https://youtu.be/kk4Isogj3KA?t=25 https://youtu.be/kk4Isogj3KA?t=25 Menco Pranda!
- naniwaduni 4y agoWell, that's certainly a way to put together a passphrase, or a band name, not sure which.
- awinter-py 4y agohonestly this helps me to understand finnegan's wake just the smallest bit
- fritztastic 4y agoI could see something like this being a nightmare for non-native speakers. English is my second language, but I speak it fluently so this is somewhat coherent. However, if I encountered something like this in other languages I understand but not fluently (French, Arabic, Italian), I would be very confused and frustrated- especially if I attempted to transcribe it from audio to understand it better.
- teeray 4y ago> Inner ladle wile, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut a raft attar cordage It’s kind of amazing how putting English through a food processor exposes its Germanic roots.
- selimthegrim 4y agoClearly a close spiritual cousin of https://allpoetry.com/ygUDuh https://allpoetry.com/ygUDuh and https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...
- pkdpic 4y agoReally nice to see the exploratorium keeping old-school parts of their site up like this. Honestly surprising. Brings back memories of the old days in their punk-rock warehouse location. Some of the best times of my life. Cleaning stains out of the tactile dome, riding skateboards the around the empty museum after we closed, cutting cows eyes open with my best friend, explaining ladle rat rotten hut to confused visitors... It's still a world-class museum but different obviously. Maybe the grunge-magic captured by this page is still alive over there in some form. *Shakes fist at time.
- monkeycantype 4y agoI love the poems of the Australian poet TT O, Initially it’s impenetrable, but once you start reading it out loud you hear in the phonetic smash of letters, the voices of inner city Melbourne in the decades between ww2 and gentrification, indigenous and immigrant voices speaking an English they’ve picked from the people around them who are often using it as a second or third language. If it’s not a time and place you remember, I’m not sure what you’ll hear when you read his poems, maybe it’s not such an obstacle, there are other places where people lived a similar experience, but for me I have to dwell on it until I hear the sounds, and then it fills we with this vivid longing for a time and place we can never go back to, a place that now exists only as a working class patina over luxury dining and real estate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_O https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_O
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThere's a few short versions of these where you say a list of words in your accent and it sounds like something else in a different accent. I'm not sure what they're called, there must be millions of them for different accents, including combinations of from/to pairs. Air Hair Lair -> Oh Hello in a posh English accent. (Similar joke used in Wallace and Grommet: "Well be there in a ... Aargh!" "In an hour? We can't wait that long") Wheel Oil Beef Hooked -> We'll I'll be fucked in an Irish accent. (Googling for more it seems the common version of that one is Whale Oil, not sure if that's to do with the host or target accent or just “Whale oil" being a real thing so the punchline is disguised for longer. Thinking about it now, these are related to the Bart Simpson prank call jokes: "I'm looking for Amanda Hugenkiss" etc.