‘My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels’ in Many Languages
omniglot.com
omniglot.com
> The Project is based on the idea that people in a foreign country have an irresistable urge to try to say something in the indigenous tongue. In most cases, however, the best a person can do is "Where is the bathroom?" a phrase that marks them as a tourist. But, if one says "I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me," you will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040201212958/http://hcs.harvar...
Thanks, now my coffee is all over my desk. ;)
> Mea navis volitans anguillis plena est
This is technically correct, but `anguillis` generally should be in the genitive case "anguillarum" for classical Latin - that is, "full 'of' eels", instead of the ablative which is used here, "full 'by means of/with respect to' eels".
> Navis volitans mihi anguillis plena est
The same criticism for `anguillis` applies here. Also, the usage of the dative of possession (mihi) is non-standard because it is usually reserved when you want to emphasize that a person has possession: "nomen mihi est Bob" -- "my name is Bob". The fact that I have a hovercraft isn't really the focus of the sentence - the fact that it is full of eels is far more interesting. It's not technically wrong, but I don't think any Roman would translate this sentence this way.
Allen and Greenough: https://books.google.com/books/about/Allen_and_Greenough_s_N..., see pages 216-217 (§349a) and 256 (§409a).
My Latin is rusty but "navis aëricumbens" invokes the image of a ship driving through the air like a skiff through water. Much better than just "flying ship" which reminds me more of an airplane than a hovercraft.
When in doubt you can always look what words the modern Romance languages use. Most seem to have a word similar to French "aéroglisseur", air glider.
In general, if you go to google translate, you'll see that this phrase is not well translated. Hovercraft is a tough one in general, and some languages don't have an eel in their vocab. Still, it shows that text translation is not very easy, as environment, persons speaking, and context really matter.
So the pillow thing is more common than you think.
:-)
But my favorite is "Personenvereinzelungsanlage" (people turn-into-singles device, aka turnstile). It describes very clearly what it does, but not how it does it. Whereas turnstile is silent regarding whether it works or not.
How about "people individualisation machine" as an alternative literal translation?
Hovercraft is occasionally used, but many (most?) Norwegians would frown at this in a Norwegian-language text, as luftputebåt does the job perfectly well, thankyouverymuch.
Then again, it is a word which is seldomly used as hovercraft are exceedingly rare around here - AFAIK there has been only one commercial service (incidentally, from the island I currently live on to the nearby town of Ålesund and some surrounding places) - it operated for a few months in 1965, being terminated after the craft capsized for the second time in as many months - more or less.
That's funny - I think most Dutch people would burst out laughing if they were to encounter 'luchtkussenboot' in a Dutch text. The correct translation of 'hovercraft' into Dutch is 'hovercraft' (at least in my area).
I've never seen 'hovercraft' used in any of them, though - I guess the reason may be simply that the word -luftputebåt- was introduced in the mid-sixties, prior to anglicisms being in vogue - and then fell out of use just as quickly as hovercraft never caught on here.
Hence, on the few occasions when we need the word, the first that pops into our minds is the Norwegian one.
Just a guess, though. I am by no means a linguist.
So luftpudebåd is the proper Danish word and hovercraft is the anglicism that is creeping into our language.
However, I tried to search for both words on Google limiting the results to the Danish top-level domain and apparently there are three times as many results for hovercraft. This may not be the best statistic for linguistics but it's all I have.
I also looked up both words in a Danish encyclopedia (http://denstoredanske.dk). There is no article for 'luftpudebåd' and the article for 'hovercraft' has no mention of the word 'luftpudebåd'.
So perhaps I'm stuck in the past when I claim that the proper Danish word is luftpudebåd...
[edit] "air-pillow" is presumably meant to be read as "air-cushioned" but in both cases the actual word was "pillow"
As a native speaker born far away from any body of water, I would have said that you could use "Luftkissenboot" and "Luftkissenfahrzeug" interchangeably but the German Wikipedia article disagrees. "Vehicle" apparently implies that it doesn't only need to work on water.
"Pillow" apparently comes from the old Germanic word "pyle" or "pylu" which is based on the Latin word "pulvinus" (meaning "cushion").
Also, happy to see they have a Venetian version :)
I would've guessed if there's a place that desperately needs hovercrafts it's Venice...
First I remembered reading a story on the internet that in Bislama, one of the official languages of the island nation of Vanuatu, the word for Helicopter is "mixmaster blong Jesus Christ". The explanation being that blades of a helicopter are like a blender, and Jesus Christ went to heaven, so "the blender that rises up to heaven".
Then, before replying with that, I wondered if there actually was any proper source for that. Now, the official bislama.org website translates helicopter to "helikopta", so we already know that this is not true[0]. Also, surely a quirk like this would be mentioned on the Wikipedia page for the language, and it is not[1]. So where did the story come from?
The only primary source that I have found for this claim is a story from the 1980s by Richard Shears, a journalist for the London Daily Mail[2].
> “Consequently, some people spoke French, other English. The original inhabitants adopted Bislama, a type of pidgin English. They also used a picture language that seemed to combine a bit of English and pidgin, resulting in a brassiere being described as “basket blong titty”. A toothbrush was “broom blong tut” (brush belonging to tooth), a helicopter was “Mixmaster blong Jesus Christ”.
Technically, it might be the case that this was a Bislama way of describing a helicopter forty years ago. But until we get some native speakers to confirm or deny this, it sounds a bit unlikely. While this is not really evidence, the writing style also makes it sound more like made up a "haha look at the primitive natives"-story.
First we get the "basket blong titty" example. Because natives don't wear bras of course, they're nudes, so they don't have a word for it. But they have baskets, and a brassiere is something to hold breasts. Hence, basket blong titty. Ha. ha. (note how of all examples they could have chosen, they zoomed in on one that involves the word "titty"). Similarly: "haha, they do not make a distinction between brooms and brushes because they are simple, so they call a toothbrush a "broom blong tut". Note: bismata.org translates "broom" as "brum", and "toothbrush" as "tutbras". Brassiere is not in their on-line dictionary yet.
And then, once you follow that logic and accept that those two things might be true, 'mixmaster blong Jesus Christ' seems both outlandish and believable at once because it is both funny and conveniently fits preconceived notions of simple, primitive island natives.
But why would the Vanatu people know what a blender is, but instead of saying blender make up a simple word "mixmaster"? Why would the first association be a blender, but not a boat propeller, which seems a lot more likely for an island nation? Why would they know about the story of Jesus Christ and his ascension, and make that the first association?
I forwarded this little investigation to Snopes with the request to get to the bottom of this and either fully debunk it or, in the unlikely case that it is/was true, confirm it.
[0] http://www.bislama.org/translate
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bislama
[2] https://nursemyra.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/mixmaster-blong-j...
It's a brand name. Like "hoover" for "vacuum cleaner".
> Why would they know about the story of Jesus Christ and his ascension
Missionaries?
But yes, the story seems dubious. I've read a similar claim that in Tok Pisin (closely related to Bislama),"eclipse" is or was rendered as "kerosin lamp belong Yesus Kraist he bugarup stop finish altagetha".* As the Tok Pisin word for "sun" is simply "san", this seems even less likely.
* Typing from memory, so spelling and grammar are likely inaccurate.
class Eel {
valueOf () {
return 'https://imgflip.com/meme/Bad-Joke-Eel';
}
}
const craftCapacity = 331,
hovercraft = Array.from(Array(craftCapacity), () => new Eel);Now looking at the ES5 spec [0], the max length of an array is an unsigned 32-bit integer due to the `ToUint32` operation that the spec defines. So that means our `craftCapacity` here needs to be 2^32-1
Sadly we can't use `Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER` here because that assumes double-precision floating points as the underlying storage method, so we just have to hardcode our value:
const hovercraft = Array(4294967295).map(() => 'https://imgflip.com/meme/Bad-Joke-Eel')
What if we used a storage method that didn't grow?
In JavaScript we have typed arrays, we could use a `Uint16Array` to store UTF-16 code points as integers in each element, then we could define the amount of eels that our "hovercraft" could store ahead of time in a way that it won't expand.
const hovercraftEelCapacity = 331 // We can define our hovercraft to have room for 331 eels
const eel = 'eel'
const hovercraft = new Uint16Array(new ArrayBuffer(2 * eel.length * hovercraftEelCapacity)) // Each "eel" takes up 3 16-bit integers
for (let i = 0; i < hovercraftEelCapacity * eel.length; i += eel.length) {
hovercraft[i] = eel.codePointAt(0)
hovercraft[i+1] = eel.codePointAt(1)
hovercraft[i+2] = eel.codePointAt(2)
}
console.log('Your hovercraft full of eels: ', hovercraft)It could be liquefied remains of eels! Although I'm guessing we would need to study a few of the translations in languages that explicitly differentiate between "a collection of whole somethings" and "an amount of something". Although now that I'm thinking about it in english saying "my hovercraft is full of eel" would imply that it's an amount of eel, not a distinct number of eels.
Still, if it were the "amount", a simpler JS expression would convey the message:
const amountOfEelsInHovercraft = Number.MAX_VALUELet me guess, I bet you think people can transmit information via the fluctuation of electromagnetic waves too. Brilliant!
Ma hovercraft's full o eels
Ma hovercraft's lippin-fou wi eels
Ma hovercraft's lippit wi eels
Ma hovercraft's breemin' ower wi eels
See ma hovercraft? See eels? Hit's pure hoachin wi them.
I wonder if there were a method by which we could falseify such a hypothesis, and simply check other social media for it's reverberations of falsehoods we intentionally plant, like how organized crime traces down their bugs, er, rats, er leakers, that's the word. Or how a fast Fourier transform looks at a periodic signal, and deduces the component frequencies.
It's probably just a pipe dream though. And we all know there isn't just this series of tubes lying around for us to practice on.
I guess this is the next best thing.
"Desolée, Je ne parle pas Français"
The Northern Sámi translation feels wrong, although its grammar never was my strong points I think more correct form would be "Mu áibmofanas lea dievva ággarasaid"; I think the English translation of "Mu áibmofatnasis lea dievva ággarasaid" would roughly be "My hovercraft has full (of) eels"
that wouldn't even surprise me because e.g. French has similar idioms, "il'y'a" ''there is'', literally ''it there has'' (though 'y' is probably not even a word on it's own, ''there is close eough'').
This is put together using the pronunciation guide present on rihan.org, which does not list IPA. So take this as a very rough attempt.
"machli" and "hawai kashti" would do
Source: http://advancepakistan.com/2017/09/20/hovercraft/ . Google translate works on both, but translates "hovercraft" as ہورچرک . The source was found by looking up the most common Urdu word (کے), and googling for "کے hovercraft".
Edits: Grammar
> L miu hobercraft stá cheno d'anguias
The-my-hovercraft
> Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas
to
> El mio aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas
And
> Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles
to
> L'aéroglisseur a moi est plein d'anguilles
Spanish and French natives feel free to correct me. :)
EDIT: Thanks for the corrections.
This sounds extremely stilted and unnatural. If you really wanted to emphasize it was your hovercraft, you’d say “mon aéroglisseur à moi est plein d’anguilles” but even then it sounds heavy handed.