• Zier@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    We need an Engrish magazine on this here Fediverse. Beans, Gentlemen!

  • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    I would have fun at a place like this. Just order a different item each time I go and see what the hell it actually is.

    • rishado@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      No, I speak Arabic and it’s not so much misspelling as like, lack of sufficient punctuation. Then that is directly thrown into a translator. I’ll use the word مشكل as an example and try to explain why the menu says ‘Tuna is a problem’. As letters, from right to left, they are l:

      m - م (the first letter on the right)

      sh - ش

      k - ك

      L - ل (last letter on the left)

      I know those standalone letters look different but that’s how they are when they’re not conjoined to other letters.

      Anyway the problem is that that word can be read multiple ways because a lot of the vowels in Arabic come from small modifiers that no one can be bothered to type out because we know how to infer the pronunciations in context. So let’s get into the conflation of the word here. Without any vowels, theoretically the word can be read as mshkl. One way to read the word مشكل can be MuSHaKKal, and with the modifiers it would look like so:

      مُشَكْل

      It’s not easy to see but the first 3 letters have modifiers that make them be pronounced as ‘Mu’, ‘Sha’, ‘K~’, ‘Al’. Pronouncing the word this way means ‘mixed’ i.e. the dish being served is Mixed Tuna AKA Tuna salad.

      Now without the modifiers the word can be read as: مشكِل

      Now theres no modifier on the second letter so it kind of just blends into the first, becoming pronounced as ‘Mush’, ‘Kill’, or ‘mash’, ‘kal’. This word literally translates to ‘problem’. And if you just put a noun before problem, it makes sense grammatically to infer that the noun is the problem. Ergo,

      “Tuna is a problem”. Also known as Tuna salad.

        • rishado@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Glad to be! Got that “why bother no one’s gonna read this anyway” feeling halfway through the comment but then remembered I wasn’t on reddit anymore

          • stelelor@lemmy.ca
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            3 months ago

            I’m late to the thread but I just wanted to say THANK YOU for taking the time to write it all up! You’ve helped me understand a few things about abjads, which makes the original post even more hilarious.

            • rishado@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Thank you for reading and enjoying! Yeah the great thing is that most of the ridiculous things in that menu have similar explanations, some are complete nonsense though

  • Pero@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    They always look weird at me when i order a luxury sofa, like “You gonna eat that whole thing?” And I tell them “Yeah!”. They always end up totally confused!

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      no, I’m not an Arab but i can read a little bit and from what i can read they’re just regular dishes. the auto translator went crazy with interpretations though. part of the problem is Arabic script doesn’t really have vowels; they have diacritics* instead but they’re rarely used (either for disambiguation or in the Quran to minimize the possibility of misreading the holy text). so imagine reading English without vowels:

      y cn prbbl tll frm cntxt wht ths mns

      but it would be hard for a machine to decipher it. these words can easily be:

      yea cone probable tall farm context wheat these mines

      once you misinterpret one word, its relation to the other words make them more likely to be misinterpreted as well.

      e:sp