Category: Uncategorized

Lara Novakov and Konstantinos Konstantinides are both right.

The dialects of the Ionian islands have had the longest exposure to Italian (from 1200 through to 1800), and has substantial Italian vocabulary. This performance of Petegola from Corfu (Mardi Gras skits) may exaggerate the intonation as vaudeville, but exaggerated vaudeville is probably the closest you’re going to get nowadays to dialect intonation; and it sounds a little Italian to me:

Why yes, petegola is Venetian, for ‘gossip’.

Of course, nothing sounds more Italian than the Greek actually spoken in Salento and Calabria: it really is Greek as rendered by the Mario Bros.

I have been A2A’d this by Alexander Lee, because I posted Nick Nicholas’ answer to Would you post a recording of yourself reciting Sophie Dockx’s Eulogia Hiphopia in Latin?

… let that be my answer to this too. 😛

Pidgins have limited vocabularies, because they are by their nature sparse languages, and pidgins sound like colonial language babytalk, because paternalism. And some of the more amusing Pidgin coinages, we can be reasonably sure, are the colonials poking fun at the natives yet again, rather than genuinely used circumlocutions.

Such as, for example, the notorious pseudo-Bislama expression for a piano (Vanuatu: Important Phrases):

Wan bigfala blak bokis hemi gat waet tut mo hemi gat blak tut, sipos yu kilim smol, hemi singaot gud.

Literally; One big fella black box, him he got white tooth and (or more/in addition to) him he got black tooth, suppose you kill him small (strike or hit lightly) him he sing out good.

Yeah… no, as we would say in Australia.

There’s also the obfuscations about obfuscation itself:

Urban Dictionary: Eschew Obfuscation, Espouse Elucidation

“Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the circumscriptional appelations are excised.” (William Mann & Sandra Thompson, Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation, 1987.)

As a surname, Rawnie turns up very rarely in Lanarkshire, Scotland (http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-b…).

As a first name, Rawnie is indeed English Romani, from the Romani rani for ‘lady’ (Message: “Re: Romani names”); it corresponds e.g. to Hungarian Romani Aranya (https://books.google.com.au/book…)

MacKenzie is an Anglicisation (with garbled yogh) of MacCoinnich = Son of Kenneth: Mackenzie (surname) – Wikipedia.

It’s inserting Justine Damond’s name into the protest chant “If we don’t get it [justice], shut it down”, which has become associated with Black Lives Matter among others, and which also turns up as the hashtag #shutitdown:

Justice: If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down! (with images, tweets) · krissmissed

If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down

Chanting Hashtags and Hashtagging Chants – The Civic Beat – Medium

“If we don’t get it, shut it down” has been a common chant at rallies—in other words, “If we don’t get justice, shut down the system.” The chant you hear in this video also includes the names of individuals who have died. At protest events, the names of those who passed are often transformed into hashtags, like #MikeBrown and #EricGarner.

JP tellement P après ces 24h convention dédicaces conférence train taxi stream de l’infini (“0_0)

— Mr. Benzaie DANIEL (@Benzaie_tgwtg) June 12, 2017

Jp tellement p c’est assez ardu

— juju (@Juliette_Vein) December 30, 2016

This is a texting abbreviation, transferred over to Twitter. I’m not sure, but I *think* this is JPP j’en pense plus, “I think more about it = I could say much more about this”, intensified with tellement: “I could say so much more about this.”

At a guess. If I’ve got it wrong, I’ve now tagged the question so a French-speaker can tell me so.

EDIT: Claire Delavallée’s answer. Downvotez-moi, s’il vous plaît!

Nick Nicholas’ answer to How would modern Greek language sound to an Ancient Greek?

You’re breaking my heart with this question, Liana. It’s not like I’m managing it.

• Nothing focuses the mind like a hard deadline. Get someone else to set you some, and hold you to account.
• Make a point of walking away after a set period of time; or designate only a set period of time a day to spend on Quora.
• Get people to hold you to that commitment.
• If A2A notices and notification alerts keep distracting you, zap them all.
• Take the app off your phone.
• Deactivate.
• Delete.
• No, I’m not doing any of these. With the exception of maybe the first one.

Masiello. Pegah. Jimmy Liu.
Sophie Dockx. Laura Hale. Ulrich, too.
de Guzman. Lisa Lai.
Jian Sun. By and by,
all are gone.

And then, me.

And then:

You.

So how *would* I render this in Klingon?

A battle in Star Trek space opera involves spaceships. Mobility in Star Trek involves spaceships, shuttles, and transporter beams. A quick exit in Star Trek routinely involves the latter.

Therefore, obviously,

jolpat! jolpat! jolpat vIDIlmeH, wo’ vInobrup!

A transporter system! A transporter system! In order to pay for a transporter system, I am prepared to give an Empire!