Babel Fish Revisited

Ah yes, language.

We all know what that is about , do we not?

I was in my office with Raquel (my Pinay assistant) the other day, and she said to me "Can I get my mp3?"

The mp3 player was right next to me on my desk, and I was standing.

So I sat down immediately, and said "Yes of course", and waited for the laugh.

The point was, what Raquel really meant was "Can you hand me my mp3?" or, "Can you get my mp3 for me please?".

I chose to interpret the statement "Can I get my mp3?" literally, knowing full well she meant "Can you hand me my mp3?".

Linguistics!

Here's another:

In French, the translation of "I have been here for eight years" is often transliterated as "I have been here since eight years" because the same word for "for" is the same as "since". The word is "depuis".

In Korean, the phrase for "Hello" is "Anyo has-seyo", but the phrase for a colloquial goodbye is "Anyeong"

Recently, in Yahoo chat, a guy said to me "I am married with three boys", and my overriding sense of humor got the better of me. I chose to interpret the "with" to mean "to" and I typed back "Isn't that illegal?".

The Philippines is rife with linguistics mistakes.

Their word for "Yes" is spelt "Oo". This makes many Americans very confused, because in the US, the phonetic "u-UH" means "yes" and the phonetic "U-uh" means no, the stress being important. In the Philippines, there is no stress on either syllable.

Again in the Philippines, how to express love. There are at least three ways.

"Mahal Kita" = I love you (literally "you are dear to me")

"Iniibig Kita" (six syllables) = I love you (literally "I am IN love with you")

I give just the two.

Innuits (Eskimos) have at least twenty different words for "snow", depending on the temperature, softness, the sound it makes when you walk, etc.

In China, if you give the wrong intonation, you may even insult somebody with a compliment!