Mystery Language

[Michael Moss]

There is one minor problem with this page and the results. I went to  
the page and pasted in the English 'Over my dead body' just for fun.  
The result was 'Manx'. So it seems that Language Guesser doesn't  
guess very well.

Oh well.

Michael Moss, PhD,
Univeristy of Gdansk

On 12 Jul 2006, at 17:04, Deborah Hoffman wrote:

> 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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