... many people will put into their mouth something in a foreign language that they wouldn't even feed to a dog in their native tongue. (NOC)
|
… he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish. (SG)
You didn't get anywhere at Unseen University without being able to understand the vast number of meanings that can be carried by the word ook. (UA)
The Librarian of Unseen University had unilaterally decided to aid comprehension by producing an Orang-utan/Human Dictionary. He’d been working on it for three months. It wasn’t easy. He’d got as far as ‘Oook’. (MA)
'... run away from any woman who pronounces “what” with two Hs.' (GP)
The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a young man in any language, especially Braille. (Ma)
'Ah, I’ve got an idea!’ said the Dean, beaming. ‘We can get Hex to reverse the thaumic flow in the cthonic matrix of the optimized bi-direction octagonate, can’t we?’
‘Well, that’s the opinion of four glasses of sherry,’ said the Archchancellor briskly, to break the ensuing silence. 'However, if I may express a preference, something that isn’t complete gibberish would be more welcome next time, please.' (SODW) Granny Weatherwax’s approach to foreign tongues was to repeat herself loudly and slowly. (WA)
Twoflower was a tourist, the first of the species to evolve on the Disc, and fundamental to his very existence was the rock-hard belief that nothing bad could really happen to him because he was not involved; he also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly.
On the face of it this gave him a survival value marginally less than, say, a soap herring, but to Rincewind’s amazement it all seemed to work and the little man’s total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away. (LF) 'I don’t begin to understand,’ he said, flatly. ‘To me it sounds like Jargon.’
‘JARGON?’ Hrsh-Hgn turned to the Bank. ‘Nonsense,’ he explained. ‘In Sadhimist tradition God invented it to foresstall the firsst attempt at intersstellar travel. To prevent scientissts from understanding each other, you understand.' (DSS) It is hard to convey five-dimensional ideas in a language evolved to scream defiance at the monkeys in the next tree. (DW)
'It’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.' (NW)
Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four. (IT)
He could shout ‘help!’ in fourteen languages and scream for mercy in a further twelve. He had passed through many countries on the Disc, some of them at high speed, and during the long, lovely, boringhours when he’d worked in the Library he’d whiled away the time by reading up on all the exotic and faraway places he’d never visited. He remembered that at the time he’d sighed with relief that he’d never have to visit them. (E)
When you spend a large part of your life underground, you develop a very literal mind. Dwarfs have no use for metaphor and simile. Rocks are hard, the darkness is dark. Start messing around with descriptions like that and you’re in big trouble, is their motto. (GG)
Nanny had an unexpected gift for languages; she could be comprehensibly incompetent in a new one within an hour or two. What she spoke was one step away from gibberish but it was authentically foreign gibberish. (Ma)
Consider orang-utans.
In all the worlds graced by their presence, it is suspected that they can talk but choose not do so in case humans put them to work, possibly in the television industry. In fact they can talk. It’s just that they talk in Orang-utan. Humans are only capable of listening in Bewilderment. (MA) There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another - language was just there to hide their thoughts. (RM)
‘That’s very high-class talkin’, that is.’
‘I can hardly understand him!’ ‘Shows it’s high class, Nobby. It wouldn’t be much good if people like you could understand him, right?' (Th) |
Author
The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
All
Archives
March 2023
|
RSS Feed
