Talk:Greek to me

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[edit] German

The German idiom "Das kommt mir Spanisch vor" (It seems Spanish) has its origin in the "Spanish court ceremony" and not because of the Spanish alphabet or the Spanish language. The new Emperors Karl, he was king of Spain, became the German Emperor in 1591. The changes in the ceremony and the behavior at the court seemed very strange (SPANISH).

Another information: the Spanish alphapet has a latin origin, the German alphabet too. It think it will not seem strange for Germans, if they look through the Spanish alphabet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.56.248.128 (talk) 16:10, August 25, 2007 (UTC)


And what about German "Das ist mir ein böhmisches Dorf" ("It's a Bohemian/Czech village for me")? It has more or less the same meaning as "Das kommt mir Spanisch vor". Shouldn't it be appended? [1]

Note that also Slovak "To je pre mňa španielska dedina" or Czech "To je pro mě španělská vesnice" speak about (spanish) village (both mean "It's a Spanish village for me"). These idioms were probably made as "mergence" of German "Das ist mir ein böhmisches Dorf" and "Das kommt mir Spanisch vor". --88.102.58.13 19:59, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Language request

Greetings, I'm about to start hitting up people who have babel-tagged themselves so that we can add other languages to the list. If you add another one, please adhere to the the following format, and enter your entry alphabetically by language. If your language uses a non-Latin alphabet, please make your contribution both in the native writing system, and in whatever the standard Latin transcription system is. (The Yiddish example is just a lorem ipsum, not real)

French: Ça m'est hébreu. (Hebrew, Hebrew alphabet)
German: Das kommt mir spanisch vor. (Spanish, Latin alphabet)
Yiddish: אידישאידישאידיש (Doss kummt mi shpanish fer). (Spanish, Latin alphabet)

If your language happens to have an article on the idiom, please feel free to link to it, both in the table (don't forget the colon before the lx. abbrev.!) and on the interwiki links! For reference, a few wikis have the expression listed on a wiktionary article, not wikipedia. Thanks samwaltz 04:13, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] References

Without questioning the usefulness of the article, and not wanting to litter the article with tags, I would like the following possibly disputed items to be referenced, in addition to the overall reference to the very definition of the term:

  • "The expression is almost exclusively used with reference to the speaker (generally "Greek to me"; rarely or never "Greek to him")"
  • that it is the dead metaphor. The "dead metaphor" article is of poor quality, by the way, so I have to explain my logic: in the dead-met expression foot of a hill the word "foot" is no longer a metaphor, but a technical term and it is easily separable out of the expresion: "You see a cone-shaped hill with a dead tree at its foot". On the other hand, the word "Greek" from the "Greek to me" is inseparable from the expression, and the expression itself is still comprehended as a metaphor; e.g., you cannot use it is a formal text. This text would define this case as dormant metaphor (btw I see this text as useful for improving quite a few articles about figures of speech).

Also I have to point out that translations into other languages must be eventually validated by really solid references: omniglot and forum.wordreference.com are no better than wikipedia and in fact even worse: they don't provide sources of their knowledge.

Finally I have very serious doubts about the Mediaeval Latin entry. As you may know, educated people, who knew Latin, knew Greek as well; the two "dead" languages being obligatory part of classical education. Threfore, while the translation itself is vaid, I doubt it was used metaphorically. `'mikka 19:47, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

As you may know, knowledge of Greek in western Europe during mediaeval times was indeed scarce; even if you were educated and knew Latin well, you may well have known no more Greek than "kyrie eleison". (I give no reference to that, but neither do you.) What seems bogus, though, is the entry in the table, "Ille graecus a me est.". That looks almost like a machine translation to me, and furthermore the only hit on Google for that phrase is on Wikipedia, so I changed it to "Graecum est; non legitur.". Alatius (talk) 07:43, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Portuguese

Here in Brazil people actually say "isto é grego para mim" (Greek to me) and not "Chinese". Doidimais Brasil 00:39, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Italian

I am a native Italian speaker. The previous version of the idiom (Questo è arabo per me) sounded a bit unnatural to me, so I have taken the liberty of changing it. The two forms I have addedd (per me, questo è arabo, and questo per me è arabo) are im my opinion what one would expect hearing, the first one conveying slightly more emphasis. If you want to question someone else's understanding of your words, instead, you would most probably say ma che, parlo arabo? "hey, am I speaking Arabic?" (in Italian that's pretty direct, but not necessarily unpolite if said to a friend. Avoid using the idiom with people you do not know well) --83.189.209.25 23:46, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] French

In French we say "C'est du chinois" (this is Chinese) and not "C'est de l'hébreux" (this is Hebrew). But I have no idea of the IPA. -Sucrine ( ><> talk) 08:19, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

It all depends on the ecolect you belong to, on your age and cultural background. I'm used to saying and hearing at least both of them: "c'est du chinois" IPA: [se dy ʃinwa], "c'est de l'hébreu" IPA: [se də lebʁø]. Mind that one can "perdre son latin", but not "son grec", and some people say "c'est du grec" IPA [se dy gʁɛk] as well (pour moi c'est du grec mais chacun son truc hein, here).--R Camus 16:57, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese Mandarin

i added the translation for chinese mandarin.

天书("Book from the Heaven") only refers to unrecognizable writing system, and 鸟语("Sounds of the Birds") only refers to unknown to unrecognizable phonology system, so i added both. But it seems 鸟语("Sounds of the Birds") has a pejorative connotation insinuating the target language inferior to the host language, so i wonder that should be noted or not. ChongLi 17:11, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Writing Systems in table

I removed this column. It seemed to me to be no more than a listing of the common writing system of the respective language, without any distinction whether it is the writing system or the language per se (in either aural or in legible written form) that form the basis of the expression: The mappings Greek -> Greek alphabet, Chinese -> Chinese characters, etc. are implicit, and does not have to be spelled out. Furthermore, it was often outright missleading: Do the Slovaks alude to Spanish as gibberish because it is written with the "Spanish alphabet"? Hardly. Alatius (talk) 08:24, 9 December 2007 (UTC)