OU blog

Personal Blogs

Richard Walker

"English As She Is Spoke"

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Richard Walker, Sunday, 15 Dec 2024, 00:17

I've often heard this expression, which I took just to mean a sort of proverbially bad phrase book. But to my surprise it turns out to be a real book.

Its true title was O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez, "The new conversation guide in Portugues and English", published in 1855, but later dubbed 'English As She As Spoke" because of the startling phrases to be found in it. The section Idiotisms and Proverbs gives a flavour of the contents:

The necessity don't know the low. 

Few, few the bird make her nest.

He is not valuable to breat that he eat.

Its are some blu stories.

Nothing some money, nothing of Swiss.

He sin in trouble water.

A bad arrangement is better than aprocess.

He have a good beak.

In the country of blinds, the one eyed men are kings.

To build castles in Espagnish.

.. and so on. You can see this kind of stuff could get you some funny looks.

The general view is that the author had a Portuguese to French phrase book and a French to English dictionary, but did not speak English, so he picked a selection from the phrase book and then used the French to English dictionary to convert the French to English word by word.

                                    French phrase book                            French-English dictionary

Portuguese phrases   ---------------------------->     French      --------------------------------------->  English (sort of)

The original French phrase book was fine but the second stage, done in a very literal way by someone who did not know the target language, produced absurd and comical results.

Out of guilt perhaps, or possibly to lend an air of authority to his own work, the author of O Novo Guia gave the respected and learned author of the original French phrase book a credit on the title page. We don't know if the latter knew he had been listed as a coauthor but if he did he can't have been too happy about it.

English As She Is Spoke is easily found on the internet and there is more background information here at Wikipedia. There is also a good Rob Words video on YouTube.

Permalink
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 2506238