Post by Kawaii Kaiju on Mar 6, 2009 17:52:25 GMT -6
Okay, so it isn't "Literature" but "language" discussion. I thought it was pretty cool and certainly worth a mention.
Map of Mutual Incomprehension
“When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word of what someone says, he or she states that it’s ‘Greek to me’. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it ’sounds like Chinese’. I’ve been told the Korean equivalent is ’sounds like Hebrew’,” says Yuval Pinter.
Which begs the question: “Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?” Well apparently there has, even if only perfunctorily, and the result is this cartogram.
Zilla (who has a friend who had a similar thought about syphilis, since English people called it the French Pox, whilst the French called it the English disease)
Map of Mutual Incomprehension
“When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word of what someone says, he or she states that it’s ‘Greek to me’. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it ’sounds like Chinese’. I’ve been told the Korean equivalent is ’sounds like Hebrew’,” says Yuval Pinter.
Which begs the question: “Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?” Well apparently there has, even if only perfunctorily, and the result is this cartogram.
Zilla (who has a friend who had a similar thought about syphilis, since English people called it the French Pox, whilst the French called it the English disease)
