Mystery Language

[Deborah Hoffman]

I generally have no use for autotranslation, but one "language guesser" suggested Manx for your phrase.  Now why a Yugoslav Princess would speak _any_ Gaelic language is beyond me, but...:-)
  http://odur.let.rug.nl/~vannoord/TextCat/Demo/textcat.html
   
    Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 17:59:31 -0700
From: STEPHEN PEARL 
Subject: Mystery Language

Dear SEELANGERS,

In one of his books, "Over My Dead Body", Rex Stout, the creator 
of the master detective, Nero Wolfe, has a bogus Yugoslav Princess 
utter the following : "Teega mee Bornie Roosa". This expression is a 
phonetic representation of her words transcribed by Wolfe's assistant and 
amanuensis, Archie Goodwin, a notorious and unrepentant monoglot. The 
meaning of the words was: "Over my dead body" and were understood by Nero Wolfe, a native Montenegrin and speaker of what was then Serbo-Croatian, as well as six or seven other languages.

The reader is clearly intended to assume that the language in 
which these words were uttered was some kind of "Yugoslav"/ Balkan/Slavic 
language. Over the years I have asked speakers of pretty well every 
European language I can think of [ except for Romany, a language of which 
I have never been able to find a speaker] if they could identify the 
language in question, but have come up empty.

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