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[felis_ultharus]

It hath now been hours and I'm still trying to figure out how an intelligent, well-educated francophone employee of a major federal government ministry could have thought that the standard English word for "les gens" was "the gigolo."

I can only assume it's the result of a prank by a malicious English-speaker. I'm not really allowed to point out people's mistakes during these placement tests, so I couldn't actually ask her.

I also wonder how many times she's written "gigolo" in place of "people" on government documents. If you get any government documents with the word "gigolo" in it where the word "people" should be, you know I've spoken to that woman.

So, yeah -- it was an interesting day giving English-as-a-second-language placement tests.

Another breakthrough in my editing has put me about one-fifth of the way through my major edit.

Comments

[sugar-spun.livejournal.com]

*cries with laughter*

So the gigolo went to their hotel and enjoyed the amenities therein?

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

They put Ludwig to music? ;) It would be appropriate considering his passion for music I suppose. Hmmm that makes me wonder if there's a drama CD. I just finished downloading the Antique BAkery drama CDs from the forum I linked in my journal. Now I have to check if tey have Ludwig II...

And that story is both hilarious and sad. I'd believe it was a prank but it seems to me the sort of thing you figure out kind of fast. Like how the first French rougemacabre's husband taught her was "Je suis ton esclave". ^_^

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

...

This is exactly the reason why, when I asked the Dutch how you said "Keep out" in their language, I Babelfished "geen Toegang" before writing it on half a dozen signs.

I used to grade Spanish tests for my high school Spanish teacher. She said the cruelest thing I ever did was once, in a fit of frustration, translate EXACTLY what the student had written on the essay portion.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to picture famous quotations with the word "people" changed to "gigolo", such as:

Religion is the opiate of the gigolo!

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It still displays on your computer as "Current Music"? I changed it to "Current Read" ages ago, and that's how it displays on my end :/

I'm somehow reminded of the story of the guy who got a kanji tatoo without knowing what it meant. It apparently expressed the tatoo artist's low opinion of the tatooee :)

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

"geen Toegang"

Access Denied? That does't sound so bad...?

That is cruel, although I often wish I could do something similar. One of my best answers for what should have been "The man took the other man out to the restaurant" was "The man is taking the man in the restaurant."

I would loved to have translated that for her!

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

hmmm, not when I'm directly on your LJ apparently. On my friends' page it does still say music though.

Haha, there was a bitter Japanese tatoo artist who got fined for something like that a while back. He was sick of white people tatooing kanji they didn't understand on themselves so he didn't exactly comply with their requests. He's make "slight" modifications, like tatooing prostitute instead of princess and so on. ^_^ That's one permanent prank though.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Access Denied? That does't sound so bad...?

No, but the Dutch were the people we were trying to keep out; I wanted to make sure that I wasn't writing PARTY HERE on everything, just in case. ^_^;; The "geen" part was right for a negative, but "Toegang" doesn't look particularly familiar, other than the -gang ending, which seems to be equivalent to -gung in German, making something a noun.

I have seen people run into problems similar to your restaurant example above when their French-English-French dictionaries only translate "embracer" as "to embrace" and "baiser" as "to kiss". Most embarrassing, that is. I would crusade against inadequate dictionaries, but it's too entertaining to explain. ^_^

[seal7.livejournal.com]

Same here, by the way- it says current music on my friends list, I was wondering about the Ludwig music too =P
Does say current read on your journal directly though... are you using S1 or S2 style system?

[seal7.livejournal.com]

Though we like to form nouns with -gung, the German for that would've been Kein Zugang, which is also a -gang word.
In any case I can see how you understand Dutch people ;) when you know German it's really possible. I'm vaguely surprised; I was even able to tell someone about the content of a news article from a Dutch webpage once. Crazy stuff.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

...aha! Lightbulb moment. I was trying to figure out where the got the negative "geen" from, as it looks nothing like "nicht" or even "nee", their word for "no". Obviously there's been a consonant shift and it comes from "kein". It's actually pretty consistent; German hard s --> Dutch z, as in "zee", 'sea'; German z --> Dutch t, as in "toegang", which is pronounced almost exactly like "Zugang", missing the voiced 's' after the initial 't'.

There's also a slight vowel shift, where oo = German long o, uu = ü, and eu is almost an ö but not quite.

They also use German slang, or at least common slang, although they tend to deny it. ^^; Explaining something at the desk often gets a casual, "ah, toll," as an answer, for example.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

That's very funny ^_^

Are the kanji for "princess" and "prostitute" very similar...?

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

S2. Though I'm *fairly* comfortable now with HTML and CSS (at least so long as I have my reference book handy, which I just packed up for the move).

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that "baiser" is "to kiss" in most high-school-level French-English dictionaries. Someone out there has a twisted sense of humour.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It's possible to get the gist of Dutch as a unilingual English speaker, too -- it's partway between English and German. "White" is closer to "witt" than "weiss," and "the" is closer to "de" than it is to "der/das/die/den/des..."

I've heard Friesland-dialect Dutch is closer to English than any other living language.

[seal7.livejournal.com]

Ahh okay that's it then. I suppose everyone who uses S1 won't see it on their friends page; I remember there is the same problem with the 'current location' thing.

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

Not really (prostitute is actually two characters, sell and spring if I remember correctly...), but if you don't know better you can't tell the difference. They both look pretty.

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

I made that mistake once in French class. My poor teacher had to explain that I hadn't got it quite right...