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linguistic curiosity of the day.
Oct. 28th, 2010 08:09 pmSo, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, lately I have been spending some time working on the Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreading Project, and one of my pet projects has been a Dutch-English dictionary c.1913. (Properly, as it's a Dutch publication: Engelsch-Nederlandsch Woordenboek.)
It's very obviously offering British English pronunciations, and incredibly posh ones, at that. I find myself staring at the screen and sounding out all of these crazy vowels and schwas where I would have expected enunciated r's and feeling like I could totally fake an educated Victorian English accent as long as I only had to use words that start with G or H.
Anyway, the example phrases are also kind of fascinating, and yesterday I found this one.
Holywell Street Literature = pornographische literatuur.
I don't know whether you need to know that I've been reading a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle in between working on this to understand my train of thought.
(The part where it actually became amusing is that when you go "What? Why?" and Google Holywell Street you get This Holywell Street which is not that Holywell Street but does suggest some sort of elaborate joke about hobbit porn.)
It's very obviously offering British English pronunciations, and incredibly posh ones, at that. I find myself staring at the screen and sounding out all of these crazy vowels and schwas where I would have expected enunciated r's and feeling like I could totally fake an educated Victorian English accent as long as I only had to use words that start with G or H.
Anyway, the example phrases are also kind of fascinating, and yesterday I found this one.
Holywell Street Literature = pornographische literatuur.
I don't know whether you need to know that I've been reading a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle in between working on this to understand my train of thought.
(The part where it actually became amusing is that when you go "What? Why?" and Google Holywell Street you get This Holywell Street which is not that Holywell Street but does suggest some sort of elaborate joke about hobbit porn.)