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Interpretations:Lesson 16

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Apparently, "none of this happened" because there were no photographs taken to PROVE that it happened. Very barbaric and disturbing, when you think about what is happening.--tehbagel 18:17, 29 Mar 2006 (CST)

To me it sounds like Flans just says a bunch of gibberish, then Linnell takes it and builds it into a big weird story, like a sort of improvisation game from "Whose Line Is It Anyway?". -Lars

I'm 95% sure Linnell plays both parts. It's a twisted parody of a "learn a language" tape, only the foreign person is telling the story of how he killed the listener's father, while the English translator repeats everything in English without even paying attention to what he's translating. It's pretty damn funny. -CapitalQ / @ / 20:04, 30 Mar 2006 (CST)
It doesn't really seem like gibberish to me. It does seem that Linnell thought about the grammar and sentence structure of this beforehand. I'm trying to puzzle it out.
Yeah, you can tell from the repeating words and ones that sound similar to their translation. Linnell either had it all written first, or he's just insanely good at improvisation. -CapitalQ / @ / 14:19, 16 Apr 2006 (CDT)

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I don't think this was off the cuff - I think this was worked out in advance -

1. It has a vocabulary that is largely internally consistent. The words translated in the first few lines of speak-n-translate retain their meaning throughout. E.g., Fehyozen = father; khoss = you, your; Mehyoodna = mother; gham = real, actual, really

2. OVS, SVO. Sentences are built one of two ways that I can detect, one with the object of the action first, e.g., "Fehyozen jeedt" = "I killed your father." That sentence reads basically, "Father killed (I)" and is O-V-S, object verb subject, which is a legitimate sentence structure. Other sentences are in normal English subject-verb-object structure, S-V-O, "Mehyoodnat khoss dham hutcht knak khuhplovha" = "Mother of you do/make vacation together." In both sentences, the word "I" is understood, which is a legitimate construction, as is the absence in the entire text of the verb "to be." Russian, for instance, omits direct use of "to be."

3. Possessives are indicated the same object-first way, with the object of the possession first with a final "t" added, and the possessor following, which you see in several human languages. Mehyoodnat khoss = Mother of you = your mother German and English contain constructions of possessives that are object first, with letter "s" added to indicate which word is the possessor.

4. Nouns are followed by their adjectives, as in Romance languages.

And so on. I don't think the fella spent _hours_ getting it just right, but there was an attempt to make it sound like a real language, and not babbling. Christina Miller, 2006

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