config@trwspp.UUCP (06/06/83)
This newsgroup may find this of interest. You can send a reply to Prof. Berry as shown in the Reply-To: field below. UCLA, apparently, isn't in Usenet as yet. ------- Forwarded Message From: ucla-vax!ucla-fs!dberry Delivered: 3 Jun 1983 18:19:13 (Fri) Full-name: Dan Berry Reply-to: dberry@ucla-locus,sdcrdcf!ucla-vax!dberry,f.dberry Subject: help on linguistic reserch project In U.S. English when one here's an an ununderstandable utterance, he or she may say "That's Greek to me". Some of us were wondering what is said in other languages. Up to now we have identified the following X,Y pairs such that in language X, the phrase is "That's Y to me": X Y ----------------------------------------------------------------- English, US Canada and UK Greek German, Germany Japanese Hebrew Chinese French Hebrew Spanish, Spain Chile Chinese Italian Arabic German, Switzerland Chinese and Spanish Hungarian Chinese Danish Greek Czech Hungarian English, UK and Australia Double Dutch Catalan Russian and Polish Portuguese, Rio Greek Portuguese, Bahia Nago Chinese and Japanese Farsi Chinese Russian Chinese We are looking for new entries for this table to make it as complete as possible. In particular, we would like to have entries for X=Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Polish, Dutch, Arabic if in fact they exist. The fact that there is no such phrase in a language is also a significant fact. Please send any new data about which you may know, including differences from what I have listed. These differences may be national or regional, so when you send an entry, indicate in ehich country or region the phrase occurs. Thank You Daniel Berry ------- End of Forwarded Message
urban@trwspp.UUCP (06/07/83)
In Esperanto, the language equivalent for `It's Greek to me' is (logically enough) "Volapuk" (the crufty international-language attempt that preceded Esperanto).
levy@princeton.UUCP (06/12/83)
For X=Greek, Y=Chinese (i.e. the Greek say "It's Chinese to me")For X=Greek, Y=Chinese (i.e. the Greek say "It's Chinese to me")..
smb@mhb5b.UUCP (06/12/83)
I once saw a copy of a technical report from IBM Yorktown (I think it was Yorktown; it was certainly IBM) comparing the difficulty of natural languages based on just such statements. I may even have a copy around, though I haven't the foggiest idea where.
nather@utastro.UUCP (06/13/83)
O.K., three times at one newsreading is enough, I have to ask: What means "cruft" ...and what's its origin? Is it a misspelling of "crud?" Context suggests it's not very complimentary. Is it related to "kludge?"
fred@umcp-cs.UUCP (06/16/83)
A few years back I saw a semi-serious paper on just this subject written by some folks at MIT. They decided to construct a partial ordering of natural languages by their relative complexity by defining the language B to be more complex than the language A if there exists in common usage in A the phrase ``It's B to me.'', or something equivalent. The result? There were no cycles. Chinese came out on top as the most complex. According to the paper Chinese uses the phrase ``It's heavenly script to me.'' This is all from memory. I'll see if I can track down a copy of the paper.