Fun with transliteration

[womzilla]

A couple of months ago, I ran across a remarkable video of people dressed like elves singing an amazingly crude song about ducks, farts, and many other very earthy words. (I think it was courtesy of smofbabe.)

The gimmick, of course, is that the singers aren't actually singing in English; they're singing Flemish. Flemish and English are fairly closely related, so it's not surprising that random words in one would sound so much like random words in the other. However,



To my amazement, I was just pointed to another remarkable video, in which a great many Hindu men and women sing in chorus about gay nuns and punk nerds, all in honor of someone named "Benny Lava". (This link courtesy of Patrick O'Leary.)

Given that the common roots of Hindi and English are about six thousand years in the past, it's amazing how easy it is to force English interpretations on this song, too.



My hat is off to the great music video directors YooTomb and Buffalax for bringing us these visions of cross-cultural, nay, universal joy.

Comments

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

I posted a couple a few days ago, and if you go where I got 'em, at Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005100.html), they've got a bunch more.

I would argue, incidentally, that it's not genetic ancestry that determines false-comprehensibility; it's phonetic similarity. If language X's phonetics are similar to your language's, language X is going to be very susceptible to this phenomenon.

This encompasses both sounds and word structure--Spanish has a subset of English's sounds, modulo a different r, but its syllable structure is very different, and the language is syllable-timed rather than stress-timed, so you're not likely to be able to false-interpret Spanish as English. But find a stress-timed language with large consonant clusters at both ends of a syllable and it'll be straightforward to false-translate into English.