finnish in hudsucker
Kolaga Xiuhtecuhtli
On 28 Mar 1998 15:36:05 GMT, bevm...@aol.com (BevMantle) wrote:
>>does anyone know what norville says in finnish that makes the investor so
>>mad?
>
>In the script it's written as "Tak sa spousa mit navelmen torsk?" so I'm
>guessing that it's "Does your wife like to do it with sailors?" or something
>along those lines.
That does not look at all like Finnish. The word "mit" could be
German. A search of Dejanews shows that "torsk" might be Norwegian.
And the "Tak sa" could be Polish. The word "spousa" sounds like
"spouse" which entered the English language from French.
The sentence "Tak sa spousa mit navelmen torsk?" is probably complete
nonsense but perhaps the spoken dialog _was_ Finnish -- or as close
to Finnish as Tim Robbins could repeat.
The humor is obvious. Norville (Tim Robbins) has spent his time
mastering a language which few business people need and he speaks
it only well enough to be punched in the face by anyone who
understands Finnish!
---
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Tweeker
<sihvonen@[209.1.224.29]> wrote:
"Tak sa spousa mit navelmen torsk?"
So what's the above in English? Please.
.______.
Tweek on
Kolaga Xiuhtecuhtli
On Tue, 07 Apr 1998 12:39:20 +0200, Sami 'SaMmIk' Sihvonen
<sihvonen@[209.1.224.29]> wrote:
>In message <6fkh78$9...@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net>,
>Xiuhte...@worldnet.att.net (Kolaga Xiuhtecuhtli) wrote:
>
>>> In the script it's written as "Tak sa spousa mit navelmen torsk?" so I'm
>>> guessing that it's "Does your wife like to do it with sailors?" or something
>>> along those lines.
>> That does not look at all like Finnish. The word "mit" could be
>> German. A search of Dejanews shows that "torsk" might be Norwegian.
>
> The above English sentence translated to Finnish is:
> "Pitääkö teidän vaimonne siitä merimiesten kanssa?"
> The original sentence is Norwegian.
I am guessing that "torsk" is the Norwegian word for the fish that we
call "cod" in English. The two words "tak sa" appear together on
several Slovenian web pages. The word "spousa" is most likely Latin.
The word "mit" is German and the word "navelmen" is English -- at
least, "men" is the English plural of "man".
I ruled Finnish out as a possible language because I've been to
Finland and I couldn't recognize any word of Finnish whatsoever.
This reminds me of a scene in Alfred Hitchcock's FOREIGN
CORRESPONDENT. Joel McCrea goes to a conference and a Latvian
man greets him. McCrea tries every language he knows and he
can't figure out what language the man is speaking. The man
is very good natured and friendly though.
http://graficonn.no/webhotell/oppskrifter/Torsk-Cod.html
>> The humor is obvious. Norville (Tim Robbins) has spent his time
>> mastering a language which few business people need and he speaks
>> it only well enough to be punched in the face by anyone who
>> understands Finnish!
>
> Actually most finns know english language pretty well,
> we all start learning it at 3rd grade in school (11 years old).
Exactly. That's why Norville (the character in the film THE HUDSUCKER
PROXY) is wasting his time if he is studying Finnish. English is
the de facto lingua franca of world commerce -- though at one time,
business people in the USA were learning Japanese...