h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No, polyglot plaza is off the table until not panicking ltd can afford paid translators.

We're allowed to pretend we understand English, you see, but other languages require professional help.

I was in a train station in Sophia. There was a door with a sign on it in Bulgarian. (Interestingly, most of the older signs in the train station were bilingual in Bulgarian and French, while most of the newer signs were bilingual in Bulgarian and English; this sign was monolingual.)

I don't speak Bulgarian. I don't read the Cyrillic alphabet. And I don't read Greek. I did, however, grow up with a Greek Cypriot granddad and with a Bible with footnotes, so I can make a stab at the Greek alphabet. And the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet, with many similarities. So I could very roughly sound out the word on the door.

And, when it did, it sounded like a romance-language word. I would say with a high degree of confidence that that door was to the office of the transport police.

I enjoyed that little bit of detective work, I must say.

TRiG.

That's a great story.

We were at the Greek embassy in Bonn, getting our passports stamped. I looked up and saw the exit sign...it said 'Exodus' in Greek...started laughing...had to try to explain to our friend and interpreter Petros why we thought it was funny...

It says Exodos on their motorway slip roads, too.

TRiG.

The way they drive, it's just good advice. (We lived there for 5 years.)

Just thinking about it, I'm pretty sure the fact that I studied Latin at school (I got an A in my O level, doncha know!) helps.

I found Mandarin fairly logical - sure , the intonation is tricky, but the grammar is very logical.

Irish I found incredibly hard to manage - I think it's been around for so long that the pronunciation has evolved soooo much with the result that looking at the written word is no help in how it sounds.

Okay, folks, we heard it from an expert...

Irish is harder than Mandarin.

Irish is actually pretty phonetic, but not in a way you'd ever guess from English. (ie, the letters and letter combinations often sound nothing like what they would in English, but they are usually pretty consistent once you know how they're pronounced.)

I'd agree though - I find it way easier to speak than to write!

>I think it's been around for so long that the pronunciation has evolved soooo much with the result that looking at the written word is no help in how it sounds.

May I politely suggest you do not try to have a go at Danish? The distance between written and spoken is rather immense - not much logic to it, either. A "d" for example can be silent, a soft "th"-like sound or almost a "t". And you just have to know... The grammar on the other hand, is quite simple.

Opposite from Finnish from what I know. Their pronounciation as far as I know follows the letters employed nicely, whereas the grammar has something like 19 cases

Finnish, at first glance, only has four letters, though: ä, l, k and y.

Polish is similar to what KD says about Irish in that the letters don't sound the way you'd expect, but consistently so, so pronounciation isn't too difficult. Knowing shorthand helped there, I found, because once you have divorced the sounds and the shapes of the letters from each other once, you can do it again and again. The first extreme example of this I encountered was the "z" in Italian being pronounce "ts". I had probably already learned this in music from such words as "scherzo" and not thought anything of it. So the transition to the German "z" pronunciation of "ts" didn't surprise me at all.

Why exactly these pronunciations are the same in German and Italian, I can't begin to imagine. The languages are hardly related. In fact, Italian seems to be one of the languages the Germans have most trouble with. Unless you count the psychological barrier they seem to have when confronted with French.

Did you hear about the Frenchman who was living with his English girlfriend in London?

One day he was struggling with "ough" pronunciations over breakfast.

B-o-r-o-u-g-h pronounced buh-ruh
B-o-u-g-h pronounced bau
B-o-u-g-h-t pronounced bort
C-o-u-g-h pronounced coff
D-o-u-g-h pronounced doe
R-o-u-g-h pronounced ruff

"I will never be able to make sense of this stupid language!" he called out to his girlfriend as she left for work.

When she arrived back that evening she found he had gone and taken all his possessions back to France. On the table was a playbill for a West End show with a knife through it.

He had angrily circled on the playbill with his girlfriend's lipstick

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I speak English, schoolboy French and Spanish, I once did an evening class in Italian, I can count to 5 in Japanese and say thank you (I think). I know a few solitary words of German and I studied Latin for a couple of years. "Hello" and "shut the door" in Welsh.

Ah yes, English pronunciation. To say it with my favourite author:

>>In the course of the century, I am inclined to think that Germany will solve her difficulty in this respect by speaking English. Every boy and girl in Germany, above the peasant class, speaks English. Were English pronunciation less arbitrary, there is not the slightest doubt but that in the course of a very few years, comparatively speaking, it would become the language of the world. All foreigners agree that, grammatically, it is the easiest language of any to learn. A German, comparing it with his own language, where every word in every sentence is governed by at least four distinct and separate rules, tells you that English has no grammar. A good many English people would seem to have come to the same conclusion; but they are wrong. As a matter of fact, there is an English grammar, and one of these days our schools will recognise the fact, and it will be taught to our children, penetrating maybe even into literary and journalistic circles. But at present we appear to agree with the foreigner that it is a quantity neglectable. English pronunciation is the stumbling-block to our progress. English spelling would seem to have been designed chiefly as a disguise to pronunciation. It is a clever idea, calculated to check presumption on the part of the foreigner; but for that he would learn it in a year.<<

( http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2183/2183-h/2183-h.htm )

For about a dozen years I have boasted that I could order, AND obtain,a beer in ten languages.

I was working in Hungary a few years back and I heard this story about one of the people I was working with who had been to the USA and picked up a few Americanisms. He was teetotal and once when in a bar the waiter approached the table and his friend asked him if he wanted a drink. The buy answered, "Sure, coke!"
The waiter brought him a beer.
The man was puzzled and his friend had to point out that the word "sure" in English is the same as the Hungarian word for beer.
NB the word for beers sounds like "shirt"

You can add Hungarian to my list of languages... two words.

Great stories here. Keep them coming.

This is a comparatively new English word combining boy and guy to give the impression of the man in question being quite young.

That's what I'd call economic spelling.

I can actually order four in Spanish! I can say "Dos cervezas" and I can say it twice...