Tuesday, 25 September 2007

The sax-playing stork gives a dilapidated taxi whisky over the quick brown fox eating glass into this boat!

After my voice lesson, I went to the Music Library. As I have written in previous entries, weird stuff happens there.

Today an interesting thing was discussed: pangrams. In case you don't know, a pangram is a phrase or statement that uses all the letters of the alphabet in a particular language. On Wikipedia, I found examples of pangrams in other languages and their translations into English. Some of them are hilarious.

Here's the standard English pangram:
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

Okay, that one is harmless enough. But obviously other languages have to have different sentences if you want the words as a collective to contain all the different letters that language's alphabet utilizes. Unfortunately, that can lead to absurdities when you translate them into English.

This is a Dutch pangram:
"Dad's wise lynx piously regarded the substantial aqueduct."

I've actually seen this French pangram before:
"Bring this old whisky to the blond smoking judge."

The German pangram is almost normal... almost:
"Franz speeds through Bavaria in a completely dilapidated taxi."

Figure the Greeks having a philosophical pangram:
"Liberty requires virtue and mettle."

The example of a Hebrew pangram starts normal... and then just ceases to be normal:
"A curious fish sailed a clear sea, and suddenly found nice company that just popped up."

This Hungarian pangram is just weird:
"An angry Mexican man, who caught his faithless son-in-law, is painting Wesselényi's house in Quito."

The Korean pangram reads like something out of a chop sockey (where's your library card?!):
"The essential condition for kiss must be touching lips each other, and it do not need special know-how."

If someone truthfully could state the Latvian pangram, I'd be impressed:
"I can eat glass and it doesn't hurt me."

This Portuguese pangram (Brazilian) is on par with chop sockeys as well (surrendered and turned to a cake):
"Strabic zebras from Java wants to pass a fax to giants girls from New York."

The Polish pangram made my friends laugh. It might be my favorite:
"Push a hedgehog or eight crates of figs into this boat."

The Slovak pangram works just a little too hard:
"A flock of happy woodpeckers by the mouth of the river Vah is teaching a silent horse to nibble on bark and feed on fresh meat."

This Spanish pangram is sort of cute:
"The stork played the sax behind the straw palisade."