A good book is a wonderful thing; you can lose yourself in someone else’s imagination, learn of things you would never otherwise have known, or just take pleasure in well-wrought sentences and memorable turns of phrase. English as She is Spoke isn’t one of those books. It’s an awful book, but a book whose sheer awfulness makes it nearly essential reading. From the first pages, it’s as though someone put Plan 9 From Outer Space between covers.
Carolino’s magnum opus is supposed to aid Portuguese speakers to learn English. A noble aim, to be sure, but… well, let’s just say it loses something in translation. If you’ve ever seen Monty Python’s “Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch, you’ve got a pretty good idea what comes next. We can only thank our lucky stars that there were no major diplomatic incidents between the United States and Portugal in the 1880′s, precipitated by senhor Carolino’s little masterpiece.
We start with short phrases in English that are useful in everyday conversation. Naturally, the cultured speaker of English should know how to request vegetables that have been boiled to a pap, perhaps served with some verjuice. And of course, one never knows when one might need to know such “Defects of the Body” as “An Ugly,” and you’d probably be as surprised as I was to learn that “Chinaman” is an “Occupation,” though if you can explain to me what a “Quarter-grandfather” is, I’d be eternally grateful. Or at least much less perplexed.
Mind you, this is only the start of an embarrasment of riches. “Familiar Phrases” yields such gems as “At what o’clock dine him?” and lets us know “He burns oneself the brains,” perhaps the most apt description of this book to be found in its own pages. “I have mind to vomit,” indeed.
And we haven’t even gotten to “Idiotisms and Proverbs”! “The stone as roll not heap up foam…” okay, that’s sensible enough. I don’t remember grandma ever mentioning anything about “com[ing] back at their muttons,” though, nor anything about “Of the hand to mouth, one lose often the soup.”
As though to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, there’s also a second book, with a further bounty of all the above, and then some. “I am going and see a my friend” pales next to the majesty that is “I should kill-you to the blows with a stick.”
Its earnestness is what makes this book so perfect; had it been written as a lark, it’d be funny, but much less so. As it is, you can just about see this as a precursor of Chico Marx, Borat, and just about anyone else who’s ever mined dialect for humor.
Further Browsing:
Wikipedia entry on English as She is Spoke
Full text of the book, courtesy of Google
Archimedes’ Lab has a section of “Eccentricities” that includes a page on Carolino’s book.
Finally, Tashian.com has a language translator that recalls the heyday of Babelfish’s unintentionally hilarious translations.
Reminds me of a scene from Casablanca:
Mr. Leuchtag: Mareichtag and I are speaking nothing but English now.
Mrs. Leuchtag: So we should feel at home when we get to America.
Carl: Very nice idea, mm-hmm.
Mr. Leuchtag: [toasting] To America!
Mrs. Leuchtag: To America!
Carl: To America!
Mr. Leuchtag: Liebchen – sweetnessheart, what watch?
Mrs. Leuchtag: Ten watch.
Mr. Leuchtag: Such much?
Carl: Hm. You will get along beautiful in America, mm-hmm.
Well, I’m off to check the hovercraft for eels…
Loved that scene.
There’s a bit in a Jo Soares book (Twelve Fingers: Biography of an Anarchist) that reads like that, too. It’s a couple of pages long, though, and I couldn’t quote as much of it as I’d want to without going way past fair use.