{"id":1829,"date":"2005-09-03T19:08:49","date_gmt":"2005-09-03T22:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/bb\/viewtopic.php?p=1508"},"modified":"2010-05-08T20:29:46","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T23:29:46","slug":"english-as-she-is-spoke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2005\/09\/03\/english-as-she-is-spoke\/","title":{"rendered":"English as She Is Spoke"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a long time I’ve read, peripherally, the phrase “English as she is spoke”, but only recently I found out that there actually is a book<\/a> by that name<\/a>. Here’s the book description from one of the links above:<\/p>\n

In 1855, when Jos\u00e9 da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino wrote an English phrasebook for Portuguese students, they faced just one problem: they didn’t know any English. Even worse, they didn’t own an English-to-Portuguese dictionary. What they did have, though, was a Portuguese-to-French dictionary, and a French-to-English dictionary. The linguistic train wreck that ensued is a classic of unintentional humor, now revived in the first newly selected edition in a century. Armed with Fonseca and Carolino’s guide, a Portuguese traveler can insult a barber (“What news tell me? All hairs dresser are newsmonger”), complain about the orchestra (“It is a noise which to cleve the head”), go hunting (“let aim it! let make fire him”), and consult a handy selection of truly mystifying “Idiotisms and Proverbs.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here are some gems from the “Proverbs” section<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Take the occasion for the hairs.<\/p>\n

To do a wink to some body.<\/p>\n

So many go the jar to spring, than at last rest there.<\/p>\n

To craunch the marmoset.<\/p>\n

To buy cat in pocket.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here’s some more information<\/a> and an explanation<\/a> for the whole thing. It seems that the much-maligned Jos\u00e9 da Fonseca was simply the author of a competently-written French phrasebook for Portuguese speakers, and that the otherwise unknown Pedro Carolino simply translated the French phrases word-for-word into English from a dictionary. A footnote says:<\/p>\n

The Proverbs and Idiotisms deserve a quick note, here, since they inspire a special wonder in the reader who knows a little Portuguese or Spanish. Fonseca’s virtues and Carolino’s flaws butt heads in this portion of the book. Fonseca made a point of translating Portuguese figures of speech into French not by rendering them word for word, but by giving a French idiom of equivalent sense; but Carolino, in his turn, simply substituted English words for the French.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, most of the samples make some sense when you retranslate them word-for-word into French… fascinating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a long time I’ve read, peripherally, the phrase “English as she is spoke”, but only recently I found out that there actually is a book by that name. Here’s the book description from one of the links above: In 1855, when Jos\u00e9 da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino wrote an English phrasebook for Portuguese students, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[36,37],"class_list":["post-1829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-history","tag-humor"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-tv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}