It's All Greek to You and Me, So What Is It to the Greeks? Part 2 - Chinese

The phrase “it’s all Greek to me” (meaning “I don’t understand it, it’s unintelligible”) is a common enough one in English to be the name of an awful lot of Greek restaurants. Quite a few other languages also use Greek as the stereotypical hard-to-understand language – mostly European languages like Portuguese, Spanish, or Norwegian, but also Persian/Farsi.

A Greek person, on the other hand, would express the same meaning with the phrase “It’s Chinese to me” – as would speakers of various other languages including French, Dutch, Russian, and various Eastern European languages; it’s an alternative option to Greek in Spanish and Portuguese, too. In fact Greek and Chinese seem to be the most popular choices of “unintelligible” languages. A few others choose Arabic or Hebrew; Dutch seems to be unique in having a phrase “That’s Latin for me”, while English, of course, also has “double Dutch”. Pleasingly, the constructed language Esperanto has a phrase “it’s all Volapük [a rival constructed language] to me”.

This week, well, you get the idea.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "Happiness arises in a state of peace, not of tumult." - Ann Radcliffe (English author and pioneer of Gothic fiction, 1764 - 1823)

   It's All Greek to You and Me, So What is It to the Greeks Part 2 - Chinese by fredwine on Scribd