From Dr. Weevil:
Someone once told me that the University of Pennsylvania was reshaping its language departments a few years back and briefly considered putting Hebrew in with Russian, Polish, and German. It wouldn’t be easy to come up with a brief and accurate description for such a disparate collection of languages, and someone facetiously suggested that it could be called the Department of Semitic and Anti-Semitic Languages.
And from Alas, a Blog:
Headline from the English edition of Pravda:
“Black to Swallow Planet Earth”
The story (which turns out to be about a black hole about 6,000 light years away, rather than a very hungry person of color) also contains a new definition of “good news”: “This is good news, is it not? It’s like learning that there is a blood-thirsty killer living next door to you.”
Is the sarcasm lost in the translation?
Yes. The original is here:
http://www.astronet.ru:8100/db/msg/1181135
The original words “horosha novost'” are sarcastic; this is conveyed here by the use of the short form “horosha” instead of the usual form “horoshaya”. A comparable way to phrase the same thing in English would be “this is some good news!” or something like that.
Huh. Not only that, it’s not “a blood-thirsty killer living next door to you” but “maniacs on every stairwell.” Thanks for the link, Avva!
If you want to have linguistic fun, read the Russian edition of Renmin Ribao (the official Chinese newspaper). I had a link with excerpts some time in the summer in my LJ (I am a LJ-friend of Avva’s).
The secretary of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at CCNY during the time my mother was the chair typically answered the phone not “Department of etc. etc., how may I help you” but simply “Yah?”. It was then suggested that he should switch to Ja, da?.
Ja Da, Ja Da, Jing Jing!
/me snickers
Three jings, please.
Ross’s commentary on a Thurber piece named “A Couple of Snapshots”:
And Thurber’s 1959 commentary:
Well, you could look at the record. The story was published in the December 1, 1950 issue, and the line is ” It may truly be said of this great lady that she loved the Java Java and it loved her.” So Ross was right after all.
Three jings, please.
Well, you could look at the record. Click the link!
Hindustan, my Hindustan, where we stopped to rest our tired caravan
Obviously there wasn’t room for the third “jing” on the paper label on the vinyl. But it’s there in the lyrics and at Wikipedia:
As usual, the part in parentheses is not part of the official title, which is just “Ja-Da” (as shown on the sheet music). I am happy to see that no less than Sharon, Lois, and Bram covered it almost 70 years after its publication. As the song says, it’s a funny little (read: trivial) melody, and the lyrics are nothing much, but when I was trying to goto sleep last night in not only earwormed me, but transformed in my head into “Eta, eta, eta eta epsilon”.
Composed by Oliver Wallace and Harold Weeks in 1917, Hindustan is a standard for trad jazz bands. . You can get the gist of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl7_R33mJK4
Personally I prefer Istanbul not Constantinople.
I saw the Preservation Hall Jazz Band forty or so years ago and am glad they’re still going strong.