lucy24 - 9:47 am on Apr 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

Surprised Lucy24 hasn't been in this thread..yet..

Matter of fact, I was reminded of this thread's existence earlier today... uhm, make that yesterday afternoon... when I noticed that a pair of my pages passed through g### Translate into Italian. (Wimp. Normally they just read it in English. I mean, heck, if they had five years of Greek in high school, what's a few paragraphs of English?) I got curious enough to replicate the act, and have to say:

Come back, translators! All is forgiven. At a certain point one of the pages says "too darn many" and I swear I expected the auto-translator to come out with the Italian for darn, as in socks. Instead it said dannatamente. My goodness. If that's the euphemism, what's the real thing?

On the other hand, I've got a subheading that says Grazie a tutti on account of those selfsame Italian readers. This threw the auto-translator into a tizzy, resulting in Grazie uno tutti. Hm, gotta watch out for those trees. Sometimes they block your view of the forest.

otoh, saying that something isn't English because it's got a 14th c French source is, ahem, cheating. Strip away all the French and there wouldn't be much left of the language. You could still talk to small children, because core vocabulary is pretty much Anglo-Saxon, but that's about it.

Oddly enough you wouldn't even be able to eat breakfast. Can't remember why, but I know I once worked through the list. Toast, bacon, juice, cereal-- everything on your table has a French or Latin name. Makes you wonder what people ate before 1066. Maybe they went hungry until-- nope, they couldn't have had dinner either. Or even supper. Both French. No lunch, no tea. (Duh.) You could talk about breakfast, but there wouldn't be much of anything to eat.

I'm hungry. How do you suggest to a French cat that it might want to remove itself from your lap?