a note from the Bone reread

[castiron]

In volume 6 of Bone, Old Man's Cave, there's a bit where the rat creatures are speaking their ancient battle language.

I would like to report that when I plug their statement "Ik garen spek nessen!" into Google Translate, GT detects it as Frisian and translates it as "I cook yarn bacon!"

(This actually kinda fits with the one rat creature's obsession with quiche....)

Comments

[tolcath]

That is funny.

[eller]

This is odd. As far as I can tell (I'm not Frisian but I am from Northern Germany), this is not a Frisian sentence.

"I cook bacon" should be something like "Ik bakje spek" (if it's cooked in an oven) or "Ik cook spek" (if it's cooked by boiling). I can only assume the yarn confusion comes from the similarity of High German "garen" (to cook something until it's done; I don't think there's an exact match in the English language) and the Frisian "garen", which indeed means yarn. Also, if "garen" is supposed to be a verb, it's clearly in the infinitive form, so "ik garen" is grammatically wrong anyway; it should be something like "ik gar" or "ik garje", depending on which Frisian dialect, yes there are several you're speaking. (Never mind that "garen", to the best of my knowledge, is not a Frisian verb.)

The "nessen" confuses me, though, I've never heard that word before. It's meaningless in any and all German dialects I know. (I'm impressed Google Translate knows (albeit imperfectly) any Low German dialects anyway!)

[castiron]

Heh, I'm not surprised that GT came up with a mess, and thanks for putting your finger on why "ik garen" feels wrong.

In story context, Nessen is the name of the rat creature language, and the sentence is probably supposed to translate as something along the lines of "I'm going to speak Nessen" or "I have to speak Nessen". The previous panel has the rat creature saying "Shoss! Nessen! Nessen!" which in contacts looks like it's meant to translate as "Shush! Nessen! Nessen!"

[eller]

Ah, thanks for that explanation - looks like it doesn't have anything to do with any German dialects, then. XD I'm still amazed that GT knows Frisian.