Mystery Language

[Ajda Kljun]

I am a native speaker of Slovene and I am very sceptical about this phrase 
being Slavic at all. 'Bornie' sounds a bit like the Slovene 'borno' 
(something like 'poor'), but I can't figure out what the other words could 
possibly mean.

Ajda Kljun

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Deborah Hoffman" <lino59 at AMERITECH.NET>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 5:04 PM
Subject: [SEELANGS] Mystery Language


>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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