Lingua mortua...

[oloriel]

You know your brain is a silly place when...

in the light of the papal election, somebody translates "You can has cheezburger" into Latin and makes it Potes habere bubula cum caseus and your first reaction is "But wait, bubula should be in the accusative, so, bubulam, and cum requires the ablative case, so it should be caseo..."
And your second reaction is "But well, 'You can has cheezburger' is grammatically incorrect, too, so maybe this is intentional?"

... and you still haven't made up your mind whether it should be corrected or not.
*facepalms*
Maybe I should just ask.

Of course, these days you can't be certain that your cheeseburger is actually made of beef, so maybe equinam would be more appropriate anyway?

Comments

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I am not going to try to translate it. I think it should be wrong. I know I could do it wrong. But could I do it wrong in the right way? "You can haz cheeseburger" is so wrong it hurts my head. So wrong I find it hard not to wince every time I see it. So a translation of it necessarily has to be wince-ably wrong in all the right ways. There is where you need a native speaker to comment on the Latin!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

You'd probably have to mess with the spelling. Everything else would change the sense, what with Latin being synthetic, [pretty much] completely unlike English. "You can has" is clearly wrong, but you probably wouldn't parse it as anything but "you can have". But mess with potes habere and you loose the references - for instance, potes habet clearly wouldn't be "you can has", but rather "you can, he has" (whatever THAT's supposed to mean).

So you'd probably have to end up with something like P0T3Z HAB3R3 BVBV1AM CVM KAZ30 (or whatever you choose to translate the cheeseburger ;)).
Of course, that looks more 1337 than LOLcat... but you can't have everything!

Yeah, seriously. Where are those native speakers when you need them! ANYONE GOT A OUIJA BOARD? I HAVE A LINGUISTIC QUESTION!

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

but you probably wouldn't parse it as anything but "you can have"

Wow! OK. I did not see that at all. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean. It has always looked like a string of nonsense words to me. I never read it as "you can have." Now I have no idea reading it that way what those cats are trying to say. Is the cat supposed to be talking? Or is someone talking to the cat?

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Wow! That comes as a surprise. Ok, now I'm questioning my own reading of it!
As I understood it, the sentence basically means either "I can have [a] cheeseburger [because I hunted it]" or "Can I have [a] cheeseburger [please please kitten-eyes]?". It is supposed to be said by the cat, hence the bad English, because cats speak their own cat-language which has different grammatical rules. ;)
But I might be wrong there.

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

Both of those sound convincing! They just did not occur to me.

I usually am quite good with mangled English as people speak it here. New York City is a world city and the majority of the non-native speakers are mostly learning it without a lot of formal help, if any. English speakers here actually unconsciously learn and translate in their heads naturally the common errors which repeat from different birth tongues they are hearing.

My daughter and many of her friends are very good mimics when telling stories--they do accents extremely well. I am not very good at that either. The Cat language did not seem to fit any patterns I had learned.

Here is one I hear constantly from my son in law, who almost always speaks to me in English, "I'm a pick up Alex." He means, "I am going to pick up Alex now." I never questioned his intent. It was crystal clear to me and a natural-sounding abuse of the language.