Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Martialis is a blog devoted to the epigrams of Martial. Is that cool, or what?

Thanks to languagehat for the link

MemeFirst - Clintonius Maximus

Regnum Clintoni benignus erit. In rebus domesticis deficit reductio fecit, Securitatis Socialis salvatus, gigantum mercatus taurus supervisus est, ‘novus economicus’ salutavit. Simul, in rebus internationalismus bonus erit. Multilateralismus conducit. Cum amico intimo Antonius Blair, primus ministrum britannicus, Viam Tertiam creavit.

Sed Eheu! Magnum disastrum suscepit sua maxima culpa. Per noctem, Novembre MCMLXXXXV Alia Occidentalis Domus Albus laborante, sibi pizza donata est a Monica Lewinsky, puella pulchrissima, sensuosa californicante, fellatrix superiore._

Omnia res lege

What can two intrepid translators, who don’t know the target language, and don’t have a dictionary of their language and the target language, but do have a dictionary of their language and a third language and that third language and the target language accomplish? Well, they can serve as a warning to others. José da Fonesca and Pedro Carolino were the two Portuguese gentlemen who, in 1855, armed with a Portuguese-French and a French-English dictionary produced a Portuguese-English phrasebook.
I’ve just picked up a nifty new edition of *English as She is Spoke*, as the result came to be known, and it certainly is something else.

Não podêmos ouvír nos.
Do not might one’s understand to speak.

Gásta-se múita lênha n’éssa cása.
One’s make us very much of the wood in that house there.

I’m not even sure what the intent of that phrase was.

On the other hand, I can’t wait to use
Quê negócio vó ôu ô demorôo?
What business has staced you?

As soon as I can figure out a suitable meaning for stace. I’m thinking something like, “This project is so staced.”

For an updated take on it, check out English As She Is Spoke vs. Babelfish!.

More things that I wish I knew when I first set out (feel free to take these cum grano salis. I’m not a language teacher, nor am I you, your milage may vary, etc.):

When it comes to exposing yourself to the language, don’t stick to the path beaten by the textbook and course materials. You need to encounter the language in the wild, and to that end you should be promiscuous in your reading materials. Language Log makes a really good point about the dread textbook sentences that demonstrate a feature of the grammar, but no native speaker would ever actually say. (”The pen of my aunt…”) The more the merrier, and if it’s not all carefully selected to be appropriate to your current skill, so much the better. Actually, if you can afford it, having more than one textbook can be really useful to contrast the approaches of the authors; sometimes it just helps to have a grammatical point explained in a different fashion. If you have access to native speakers, that’s good too, but as someone whose current interests are Latin and Old English I don’t want to make too much of that. Watching TV and listening to radio in the language (if available) are also good, particularly for training your ear to hear word boundaries, but it’s pretty easy to fool yourself that you’re studying when you’re actually just watching TV.

Try to learn the example sentences and longer passages by heart, particularly if they’re selected from actual literature in the language. I find it really helps to be able to anchor grammatical knowledge in concrete examples. When you’re thinking about whether a sentence is grammatical in your native language, you often construct sample sentences that you know are valid to compare it to; when it’s not your native language your ability to spontaneously generate such sentences is going to be much more limited–having a ready-to-mind stock of sentences that you know pass muster with native speakers can help.

Be bold. Native speakers misspeak all the time, and the language police don’t hold them up to public humiliation, unless the speaker’s name is Bush. If you try to stick to only what you’ve thoroughly mastered, in speech or writing, then you’re going to spend much too much time creeping about tentatively in “The pen of my aunt…” territory, which ought to be just as embarrassing, as well as being boring for you and your audience.

I love learning new languages. Too bad I’m not very good at it; at least, I’ve never reached the point of fluency with any language except English. At my best I’ve reached the stage of being able to read a newspaper or comic with the aid of a dictionary, but even that’s a peak that I need practice to maintain, and I haven’t kept in practice. What I really ought to have done is spent more time abroad, especially in college. I could have wasted my time just as efficiently in Italy or Japan, but at least I would have gotten plenty of opportunity to practice.

Still, just as it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, it’s never too late to learn (or re-learn) a language, and I’ve learned one or two things over the years that I wish I had known when I started out. For one thing, as Eleanor Harz Jorden points out in Beginning Japanese, all language learning is over-learning. In other words the entire point of learning something in a new language should be to learn it until recall is not just effortless, but comes to mind unbidden before you even have to direct your attention to recall. See, I was a good student, and had a good memory, but I would always learn things just until the point where I could recall accurately–and then stop. I would get A’s on the tests, but they took a lot more effort than they should have because I would always have to run through conjugations mentally to find what I was looking for, and reading and writing was mentally draining. Looking back, it was a wonder that I did as well as I did. If I had taken the trouble in the beginning to drill until I had overlearned it, instead of indexing through amo, amas, amat, amamus… as soon as I saw “they love” amant would leap directly to mind. As it was, I assumed that since I was getting A’s, I was learning and eventually it would somehow “click.”

Mother Tongue