Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Welsh

I have a Welsh friend named Geraint. We went to university together. One day we were in some club chatting away and we decided it would be a good idea if he taught me some useful Welsh phrases - you know, in case I ever got stuck in a situation where only Welsh would solve the problem.

Unfortunately, seeing as we were both fairly inebriated, neither of us could think of too many key phrases. So I settled for "Look at my breasts, aren't they great!" I memorised this, but we both agreed that it would be a good idea for him to text it to me so I had a point of reference the next day.

Unbeknownst to Geraint, I had recently got a new phone. And hawked the old one to my mum (for, as I recall, the princely sum of £40 which in retrospect was a big rip-off - sorry Mum). Imagine her surprise the following morning when she was presented with what started off as Welsh gibberish (which would not have been so bad) but with a helpful English translation.

My mum forwarded me the text mail pretty much without comment. It was rather embarassing.

But imagine my chagrin to discover the following from Geraint today:
* ps, i learnt a new word in welsh - fronau (vron - eye) breasts. it would seem that cleddau is 'tits'. sorry for any confusion.*
So all this time I have been referring to my tits not my breasts! All the Welsh people who have considered me to be both crude and surprisingly proud of my own anatomy!

Helpfully, Geraint has sent me some new words to learn. They are: moist, naked, and parents. So, I could feasibly learn the new phrase, "Look at my naked parents! Aren't they great!"

Anyone with any other languages who would like to teach me some equally useful words/phrases, please send them along - I have a quite impressive capacity for language. One day I hope to have the above phrase in up to 20 languages...

4 Comments:

Blogger surly girl said...

i can say "your mother is a donkey" in arabic. not sure how useful that is though.

7/2/06 4:12 pm  
Blogger Kyahgirl said...

oh god, you had me laughing like an idiot over this one!!

7/2/06 5:21 pm  
Blogger mig bardsley said...

LOL....ROTFL!!!
Yes I remember it :)

8/2/06 2:39 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

In the bastardised Dutch that South Africans refer to as Afrikaans I can offer you the following exciting translations:

You may need the Afrikaans Pronunciation guide up at Wikipedia for these.

"Look at my breasts, aren't they great!" - "Kyk na my borste, is hulle nie fastasties nie!"

"Look at my naked parents! Aren't they great!" - "Kyk vir my kaal-gat ouers, is hulle nie fantasties nie?"

Here, "great" has been replaced with "fantastic" because the translation of great into Afrikaans leaves us with some ambiguity about whether the subject is really good or really massive... this is subtle but when discussing breasts it may cross one line in the sand too many. If you do want "great" as in size then replace "fantasties" with "groot".

And yes, that's a double negative that's been worked into the grammar of the language *sigh*.

7/9/07 4:29 pm  

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