'Ten jew berry muds"

[Bobbieo]

This is an exercise in language skills. Do you think Bush could get it?To get the full effect, this should be read aloud. You will understand what "ten jew berry muds" means by the end of the conversation. This was nominated for the best email of 2005.

The following is a telephone exchange between a hotel guest and room-service, at a hotel in Asia, which was recorded and published in the Far East Economic Review:


Room Service (RS): "Morrin. Roon sirbees."


Guest (G): "Sorry, I thought I dialed room-service."


RS: "Rye..Roon sirbees..morrin! Jewish to oddor sunteen??"


G: "Uh..yes..I'd like some bacon and eggs."


RS: "Ow July den?"

G: "What??"

RS: "Ow July den?...pryed, boyud, poochd

G: "Oh, the eggs! How do I like them?
Sorry, scrambled please."

RS: Hokay. An Sahn toes

G:"What?"

RS:"An toes. July Sahn toes

G:"I don't think so

RS: "No? Judo wan sahn toes

G: "I feel really bad about this, but I don't know what 'judo wan sahn toes'means

RS: "Toes! toes!...Why jew don juan toes? Ow bow Anglish moppin we bodder?"

G: "English muffin!! I've got it! You were saying 'Toast.' Fine. Yes, an English muffin will be fine."

RS: "We bodder?"

G: "No...just put the bodder on the side-

RS: "Wad!?"

G: "I mean butter...just put it on the side."

RS: "Copy?"

G: "Excuse me?"

RS: "Copy...tea...meel?"

G: "Yes. Coffee, please, and that's all

RS: "One Minnie. Scramah egg, crease baykem, Anglish moppin we bodder on sigh and copy....rye??"

G: "Whatever you say

RS: "Ten jew berry muds."

This is scary...I can actually read and understand this!!

[jkshaw]

1. Thanks Bobbeio!

This is great. Sent it on to my daughter in Ames, Iowa. She's a great fan of Anguish English.

[lonestarnot]

2. Ten jew berry muds.

[Bobbieo]

4. Think this should be a test question for ANYONE applying for the diplomatic corps.

In other words how aware are you of another person's ability to speak English. Or do you really care?

[lonestarnot]

5. May be entertaining.

I am not aware of other person's ability to speak English and unless they speak either that or Spanish, no comprendo.

[emilyg]

3. Thanks - still laughing.

[Igel]

6. Didn't need to get past your first sentence to understand it.

My scant second-language acquisition training (and I do mean scant) says that intonation and rhythm in a sentence matters a lot. Especially if it's a native or native-like pronunciation. This jives with my psycholinguistic training and a view of phonology that I was never taught in school (and which I don't actually think is a complete answer).

We tend to start building meaning and forming hypotheses about what words are coming as we listen to a word and the sentence it's in. To a large extent, language may be redundant, but we also often don't really pay attention, we just listen just for confirmation as to which posited choice is correct. If we hear 'kopee', by the time we get to the 'p' we've already ruled out all the words that don't begin with 'ko-', 'sandwich', 'popcorn', 'guinea pig'; given the context we're also ruling out a lot of irrelevant words like 'kopeck' and 'copayment'. If there's a native-like rhythm to the words and the sentence, then by the time we get to the 'p' we even know that the word's going to stop after the second syllable. In any event, if the grammar's reliable we know what grammatical category (noun, verb, etc.) to expect, and that limits the word choice. (Pitch in knowledge about word frequencies, and you have a native-speaker's ability to deal with a Cloze test.)

Joan Bybee also has a schtick about how we understand words, and it's not by listening to the sounds and mapping them onto some sort of abstract representation like Chomsky would have said. Instead we remember what a word sounds like, the whole thing, and sort of attach each token that we hear to the right meaning, so as to produce a cluster of overlapping tokens. Then we generalize over all the tokens to come up with an average. I think that's a bit oversimplified, there are too many times when we 'see' inside a token, but then again she may think so, too--I haven't read her book, just a couple of articles and some summaries. 'p' may not be a lot like 'f', but it's closer than 't'--since the word 'copy' is ruled out by context we'd be casting about for something that's 'copy'-like, not 'kotex'-like, and about the nearest thing is 'coffee' ... satisfying our real-world expectations.

Neat linguistic exercise.

[rachel23]

7. I don't get it

Can someone explain this to me?