Hacker News Reader

Comment by kthejoker2 | Hacker News Reader

I won't claim it's more or less impressive, but

Luis Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures is at first glance abstract (bordering on the nonsensical) French poetry ..

But is actually a homophonic translation of English nursery rhymes - that is, if you read the French aloud, it sounds as if you're reading the rhyme.

Example:

    Un petit d'un petit
    S'étonne aux Halles
    Un petit d'un petit
    Ah! degrés te fallent
    Indolent qui ne sort cesse
    Indolent qui ne se mène
    Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
    Tout Gai de Reguennes.

(If you read it aloud you will recognize a well-known scrambled egg...)

The effort is in making the French poetry make any sense, which van Rooten (a Hollywood character actor in his spare time) does admirably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures?wprov=sfla1

View on HN

To hear it read aloud:

https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&text=Un%20petit%20d%27un...

Using the desktop browser version of Google Translate, click on the listen/speaker icon below the French text in the left side panel

Amazing! Also works on mobile on the actual website.

I had to listen to it three times before I was able to make heads or tails out of it. But it was worth it.

I'm thinking this must be something that has been manually tweaked by someone on the Google translate team. Otherwise, how in the world does it pronounce it with the cadence of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme?

Because poetry is the mastery of meter, and meter is a thing

The commas give it the right rhythm I believe. I can only hear French though, maybe because I never heard the English version.

Yes, I added commas at the ends of a few lines, which cues the speech engine to create more appropriate intonation and natural pauses. But parts of the second half of the poem are still not so intelligible in English

Thanks for that. It worked. I cut/paste the words before I saw your post. It gets so jammed together that way that it is hard to understand. The commas made it easy to understand.

This reminds me of a similar homophonic rendition, in which the French actually makes some sense (https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/mots06-etquirit.htm) - I actually first saw this in the Whole Earth Catalog, of all places.

   Et qui rit des curés d'Oc?
   De Meuse raines, houp! de cloques.
   De quelles loques ce turque coin.
   Et ne d'ânes ni rennes,
   Écuries des curés d'Oc.

That's pretty good. The translation notes are completely bonkers.

Apparently my knowledge of French pronunciation is nowhere near sufficient to figure this out. Based on the Wikipedia article, it seems the first line is supposed to sound like “Humpty Dumpty.”

If you read the English line first with a ridiculous French accent (like you might hear in Monty Python) and then read the French in an equally silly way, with a bit of imagination they sound broadly quite similar. Basically if you can make "Mots d'Heures" into "mother", you're well on your way!

You need to imagine a French person speaking English with strong accent (e.g. Michelle in Gilmore Girls) to get “Humpty Dumpty” (which is obvious I guess, since the poem is in French, I suppose you couldn’t make it sound like an English or American accent)

You didn't fail, it's just that this supposed translation makes a lot of assumptions about how it will be read.

I speak French, and did not immediately recognize "Un petit d'un petit" as "Humpty Dumpty"; the "correct" reading relies on knowing that a native French-speaker might pronounce "hump" as "ump". It is not simply a mapping of syllables to phonemes.

In other words, it's an extremely targeted joke, intended at people who have specific expectations about how both French and English are read and spoken.

I know another French joke that is extremely targeted in exactly the same way. It's from Canada, and it pretty much only works when read aloud.

    Eh, did you notice there's no h in 'ere?
    It's 'cos they left it in h'Ottawa.

For people who don't know the accent, French people don't typically pronounce the h initial in words like 'here', (or 'humpty' for that matter) and they add an h to vowel initial words like 'Ottawa'.

Another joke we have refers to how the French pronounce the English word "happiness."

At best it sounds like hunpety hunpety. It's said to be homophonic, but at best there's a resemblance. I suppose it matters how you're pronouncing the French -- in a modern pronunciation there's really no resemblance.

There was an old flash animation that did a similar thing with a Japanese rap using English words

https://youtu.be/VCOEh_Dnkeg

Ah yes, animutation. This was peak meme culture back in the early aughts. Mmm, tasty nostalgia.

What's interesting about internet meme culture (back then and to this day) is that it's quite Dadaist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animutation

Oh gosh, there's a all wiki full of that https://wiki.animutationportal.com/Super_Smash_Bros._Animuta...

Wow!! I had to go to the Wikipedia page to fully appreciate it. Thank you for sharing that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com