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]

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.