
‘My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels’ in Many Languages - dbasedweeb
https://omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm
======
pimlottc
Those of a certain age may remember a similar project by Ethan Mollick on what
Wikipedia adorably calls the “early web” in which the phrase was “I can eat
glass, it does not hurt me”.

> The Project is based on the idea that people in a foreign country have an
> irresistable urge to try to say something in the indigenous tongue. In most
> cases, however, the best a person can do is "Where is the bathroom?" a
> phrase that marks them as a tourist. But, if one says "I can eat glass, it
> doesn't hurt me," you will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with
> dignity and respect.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20040201212958/http://hcs.harvar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20040201212958/http://hcs.harvard.edu/~igp/glass.html)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_Eat_Glass)

~~~
Balgair
> > But, if one says "I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me," you will be viewed
> as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect.

Thanks, now my coffee is all over my desk. ;)

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tylerhou
The Latin is somewhat awkward:

> Mea navis volitans anguillis plena est

This is technically correct, but `anguillis` generally should be in the
genitive case "anguillarum" for classical Latin - that is, "full 'of' eels",
instead of the ablative which is used here, "full 'by means of/with respect
to' eels".

> Navis volitans mihi anguillis plena est

The same criticism for `anguillis` applies here. Also, the usage of the dative
of possession (mihi) is non-standard because it is usually reserved when you
want to emphasize that a person has possession: "nomen mihi est Bob" \-- " _my
name_ is Bob". The fact that I have a hovercraft isn't really the focus of the
sentence - the fact that it is full of eels is far more interesting. It's not
technically wrong, but I don't think any Roman would translate this sentence
this way.

~~~
pfortuny
AFAIK plenus requires an ablative: like in “gratia plena” (full of grace),
“pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua” (heavens and earth are full of your
glory) etc...

~~~
rileyphone
The Wiktionary page for plenūs states it moved from the genitive to the
ablative in later Latin (eg liturgical), so it seems your both right!

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Balgair
The Maori translation is a bit off, as it says that the (poorly translated)
hovercraft is made with a peak amount of eel (not plural). It seems a fair
number of these translations do not connotate that the hovercraft is filled
with eels (plural) but rather that it is an eel (singular) that is taking up a
lot of room in the hovercraft.

In general, if you go to google translate, you'll see that this phrase is not
well translated. Hovercraft is a tough one in general, and some languages
don't have an eel in their vocab. Still, it shows that text translation is not
very easy, as environment, persons speaking, and context _really_ matter.

~~~
_-__---
How would one say this in a better Maori translation?

~~~
Balgair
__ ____ _- ___- _ -_ --- __ -__ _ _- --··-- __ _--- __- ___ - _-- _- -_ - -
--- ___ --- __- -_ -__ ___ -- _- _-_ - ·-·-·- __-_ --- _-_ --_ __ ___- _ -- _
--··-- _--_ _-

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egypturnash
The fact that someone translated this into _Sumerian_ made me laugh out loud.
My brain finds strange things funny sometimes.

~~~
basementcat
How did they figure out how to write 'hovercraft' in Sumerian? Was there a
'Rosetta Stone' like codex describing futuristic transportation technology?

~~~
biztos
The German and (ironically?) Hungarian translations both use "air-pillow" for
the hovering part, though in German they translated it as "vehicle" and in
Hungarian as "boat." Go figure.

[edit] "air-pillow" is presumably meant to be read as "air-cushioned" but in
both cases the actual word was "pillow"

~~~
teamhappy
"Kissen" (German for "pillow") and "cushion" have the same origin. The old
french word "cuissin", meaning "cushion for the hip" (comes from "coxa" which
is "hip" in Latin).

"Pillow" apparently comes from the old Germanic word "pyle" or "pylu" which is
based on the Latin word "pulvinus" (meaning "cushion").

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ekke
This is HN after all - some version of ES/JS:

    
    
      class Eel {
          valueOf () { 
              return 'https://imgflip.com/meme/Bad-Joke-Eel';
          }
      }
    
      const craftCapacity = 331,
            hovercraft = Array.from(Array(craftCapacity), () => new Eel);

~~~
Klathmon
It's "My hovercraft is _full_ of eels", not "My hovercraft has an arbitrary
amount of eels in it"!

Now looking at the ES5 spec [0], the max length of an array is an unsigned
32-bit integer due to the `ToUint32` operation that the spec defines. So that
means our `craftCapacity` here needs to be 2^32-1

Sadly we can't use `Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER` here because that assumes double-
precision floating points as the underlying storage method, so we just have to
hardcode our value:

    
    
      const hovercraft = Array(4294967295).map(() => 'https://imgflip.com/meme/Bad-Joke-Eel')
    

[0] While the spec says this in a roundabout way, i'm not sure if any
implementations actually adhere to this limit, and i'd guess most convert the
array to a hashtable internally long before it gets to that size.

~~~
bebe3000
ekke assumed the hovercraft can hold at most 331 eels. You assumed it holds 4
billion eels. Who's right? I don't know but a billion eels sounds far off.

~~~
Klathmon
If an array is the hovercraft, it can hold 4 billion "things" regardless of
what those things are! So you need to fill that up to meet the requirements of
the saying.

~~~
simsla
And if a hovercraft is an array of size 331, then it should hold 331 eels.

~~~
peeters
Ah but now we're at the crux of the issue; in Javascript, hovercrafts grow in
size to accommodate as many eels as you put in, but to a maximum of ~4
billion. So "full" is not a question you can ask of your hovercraft, though it
will tell you once it's overflowing.

~~~
Klathmon
Now there's a thought!

What if we used a storage method that didn't grow?

In JavaScript we have typed arrays, we could use a `Uint16Array` to store
UTF-16 code points as integers in each element, then we could define the
amount of eels that our "hovercraft" could store ahead of time in a way that
it won't expand.

    
    
      const hovercraftEelCapacity = 331 // We can define our hovercraft to have room for 331 eels
      const eel = 'eel'
      const hovercraft = new Uint16Array(new ArrayBuffer(2 * eel.length * hovercraftEelCapacity)) // Each "eel" takes up 3 16-bit integers
    
      for (let i = 0; i < hovercraftEelCapacity * eel.length; i += eel.length) {
        hovercraft[i] = eel.codePointAt(0)
        hovercraft[i+1] = eel.codePointAt(1)
        hovercraft[i+2] = eel.codePointAt(2)
      }
    
      console.log('Your hovercraft full of eels: ', hovercraft)

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kaycebasques
I wish that this site also translated the translations back into English,
similar to what many people are doing in this thread.

------
exabrial
I spit my milk out on the Scottish one

~~~
jwilk
Do you mean Scots or Scottish Gaelic?

~~~
ryan-allen
I'm guessing they meant Scots, there are some variations:

Ma hovercraft's full o eels

Ma hovercraft's lippin-fou wi eels

Ma hovercraft's lippit wi eels

Ma hovercraft's breemin' ower wi eels

See ma hovercraft? See eels? Hit's pure hoachin wi them.

~~~
exabrial
I just imagine the TF2 guy saying this

~~~
coldcode
Or Willie from the Simpsons

~~~
ryan-allen
On the site I discovered today they have audio recordings of lots of the
sayings, and all of the Scots translations have them!

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singingfish
this is my go to page for testing unicode stuff :)

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nanis
The Turkish _translation_ (rather than word substitution) would be:
"Hoverkraftımı mürenler (or just müren) bastı".

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flyingcircus3
Sometimes I wonder if hackernews has become a reliable training ground for
nascent neural networks. This thread of comments perfectly follows the trend
of "the best way to find the right answer is to put a bunch of wrong answers
on the internet, and just let those hairsplitters sort this out."

I wonder if there were a method by which we could falseify such a hypothesis,
and simply check other social media for it's reverberations of falsehoods we
intentionally plant, like how organized crime traces down their bugs, er,
rats, er leakers, that's the word. Or how a fast Fourier transform looks at a
periodic signal, and deduces the component frequencies.

It's probably just a pipe dream though. And we all know there isn't just this
series of tubes lying around for us to practice on.

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taserian
I've always wanted a page where it would have the translation of "I'm sorry,
but I don't speak a word of X" in perfectly enunciated X for all X in
[Languages].

I guess this is the next best thing.

~~~
Tephlon
One of my favourite things to do is say "I'm sorry, I don't speak any French"
in perfect French (According to an actual French person).

"Desolée, Je ne parle pas Français"

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zokier
The Finnish translation, while very much correct, feels bit archaic; I think
at least in casual contexts most people would use the form "Minun
ilmatyynyalus on täynnä ankeriaita"

The Northern Sámi translation feels wrong, although its grammar never was my
strong points I think more correct form would be "Mu áibmofanas lea dievva
ággarasaid"; I think the English translation of "Mu áibmofatnasis lea dievva
ággarasaid" would roughly be "My hovercraft has full (of) eels"

~~~
posterboy
> My hovercraft has full (of) eels

that wouldn't even surprise me because e.g. French has similar idioms,
"il'y'a" ''there is'', literally ''it there has'' (though 'y' is probably not
even a word on it's own, ''there is close eough'').

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coldcode
Sadly no pronunciation of the Romulan "Arham rrh'eilln selae'enh
ihircrycae'eri nnea drihaen'in'hhuien"

~~~
jdmichal
/a.ɾʰam r̩ʰ.eɪ.l̩n sɛ.le.ɛɲ i.hir.kɾɪ.ke.ɛ.ɾi nːɛ.a dɾi.hen.in.xuɪ.ɛn/

This is put together using the pronunciation guide present on rihan.org, which
does not list IPA. So take this as a very rough attempt.

------
Angostura
My nipples explode with delight.

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alistoriv
Happy to see a Welsh translation, but I'm interested where the word for
hovercraft came from. The hofren part comes from hofran (which is just a
borrowing of hover), but what about fad?

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masteruvpuppetz
Fork!! no Urdu?

~~~
fahadkhan
There's a invitation to contact the author with additions at the bottom of the
page. I would if I knew what eel and hovercraft are in Urdu.

~~~
masteruvpuppetz
idk!!

"machli" and "hawai kashti" would do

~~~
fahadkhan
Machli (fish) is too generic, I think. "Hawai kashti" is probably right. I
don't know if it's in use. Most likely the word is Hovercraft.

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yantrams
This got me thinking about what an appropriate word for hovercraft in Sanskrit
could be. Sarva-Madhyama-Plavaka maybe? Translates to something that
jumps/glides over all media.

Edits: Grammar

~~~
monster_group
Wouldn't प्लवयानम् be sufficient (literally translates to hover-vehicle)? Full
sentence would be मम प्लवयानं जलव्यालैः सम्मर्दम्।

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talonx
A lot of Indian language translations are a bit off. I wonder how many others
that I don't know myself are too?

~~~
xelxebar
The Japanese is also awkward. The recording is also extremely non-native.

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pjmlp
Mirandese

> L miu hobercraft stá cheno d'anguias

~~~
petecox
It's interesting that a number of Romance languages, but notably not Spanish
or French, prefix the subject pronoun (my) with a definite article.

The-my-hovercraft

~~~
iopq
Es el mio is perfectly good Spanish

~~~
pjmlp
Yep, I guess we could change

> Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas

to

> El mio aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas

And

> Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles

to

> L'aéroglisseur a moi est plein d'anguilles

Spanish and French natives feel free to correct me. :)

EDIT: Thanks for the corrections.

~~~
GuiA
_> L'aéroglisseur a moi est plein d'anguilles_

This sounds extremely stilted and unnatural. If you really wanted to emphasize
it was your hovercraft, you’d say “mon aéroglisseur à moi est plein
d’anguilles” but even then it sounds heavy handed.

~~~
posterboy
This there hovercraft of mine and oh ain't I speaking a fancy francy.

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Ritsuko_akagi
juts wanted to say eel is called as kucia "কুচিয়া" in assamese but the page
says eel.

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AlphaWeaver
I enjoyed the conlangs section. It has Klingon, Toki pona, Esperanto, and
more!

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richardpetersen
If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

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neelkadia
Where is Sanskrit!!!?

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_bxg1
I'm so glad they have Quenya.

