SAHT NA KCHRI TE SALAAM ANDER BWTAT
Saghtgwan tlap ne Salaam Ander bwtati og theni berchi ne Simbwana mbengwe ogandi sukh na moimol opwana Salaam Ander sri moana gwens. Og di limbw, og di bwtat na Salaam Ander kchri pche ogandi pwe ogwandi te ur maswali sukh? Na, ne ur lingo tIslamli kcher oganda Salaam Andrias sahti. Bend optonga kchri Simbwana médh, salaam!
Google Translate's auto-detect can't make up it's mind whether this is German or Filipino, but then doesn't provide a translation for either one. If that's German, I'm the man on the moon.
I first encountered this passage back in the 90s, in Karel Čapek's novel War with the Newts. You might know him as the guy who invented the term 'robot'. Like his other works most of the novel was originally written in Czech. The above passage is supposed to be an untranslated newspaper clipping about the discovery of the Newts, a race of sentient undersea creatures.
A Return to the Stars
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After a veeeeerrrryyyy long, and mostly unplanned, hiatus, Stuart and I got
together to play more Stargrave in recent days. It was good! It was also a
bit ...
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Posts
Well, according to footnote 8 on Project Gutenberg, it's an unknown language. Maybe he just made it up?
ReplyDeleteIt must be made up: there are wordplays and puns like "Salaam Ander" (= salamander, newt).
ReplyDeleteI don't recognize it as Filipino (or even Tagalog which was what became one of our national languages).
ReplyDeleteSalaam sounds familiar because of the muslim greeting, and because of Tagalog's salamat (which means thank you and probably came from the malay / indonesian use of the word Salaam.
But the rest of the words read vaguely like African languages.
I can do nothing more than attest that you are not the man on the moon... Great book, by the way. And in my German edition it isn't translated either...
ReplyDeleteIs it possible that it is anglicized Sanskrit or Tamil?
ReplyDeleteI think it's just a mish-mash of languages around the Dutch East Indies, but like John said, anglicized.
ReplyDeleteIt looks mostly like African and Indian dialects with some Scandinavian, Arabic or Turkish thrown in.
It's more then one language. It could be a pidgeon.
ReplyDeleteSorry doesn't ring a bell. I could help you though if it was Czech (I don't see any obvious word-plays in that language in that clip).
ReplyDeleteIts sounds like Edward James Olmos accosting Harrison Ford at a walk-up sushi stand.
ReplyDeletetry this site for the passage
ReplyDeletetry this
To add to the list of languages it isn't, I can add the Scandinavian ones, including Icelandic. The only word that could be Danish or Norwegian is og, which means "and".
ReplyDeleteIjust played a little bit with google translator and let it translate from Czech to English:
ReplyDeleteON TE Sahti KCHRI Salaam ANDERE BWTAT Saghtgwan not paws Salaam Ander bwtati og then Berchem not Simbwana mbengwe ogandi sukha to moimol opwana Salaam Ander Sri Moana gwens. Og di limbw, og di bwtat to Salaam Ander kchri bah ogandi PWE ogwandi maswali sukha te ur? Here, no ur Lingo tIslamli kcher oganda Andrias Sahti Salaam. Bend optonga kchri Simbwana Mehdi, Salaam!
I bolded the important part. ;)
'Salaam' sounds Middle Eastern, but 'Simbwana' sounds like Swahili. So perhaps it's a combination of words from different languages.
ReplyDelete