Monday, March 25, 2013

Calling multilinguals ...

Noted linguist and novelist Rosina Lippi has an intriguing request out ... here

She's got this scenario:
one character tells another character that there’s a list of about ten phrases he can say in fifty different languages or dialects of languages. She doesn’t believe him, and challenges him. The sentence she chooses (of the ones on his list) is “Why did you kill your wife?”
She needs the last sentence translated into lots of dialects and languages by native speakers. Help her out. 

Rosina concludes "Eventually you’ll find out what I’m doing with this." I'm dying -- figuratively, not literally -- to know she's up to here. 

7 comments:

Natália Guerreiro said...

The link won't open here, but in Brazilian Portuguese, it would be, "Por que você/o senhor matou sua esposa/mulher?"

Mr. Verb said...

Odd, it works from my machine. Here's the url:

http://rosinalippi.com/weblog/?p=1521

Jcon said...

In Mandarin, I believe it would be "为什么你杀你妻子?", Pinyin: "Wèishéme nǐ shā nǐ qīzi?"

Rosina Lippi Green said...

Thank you, Mr. Verb, for the shout out. Lots of good info coming in.

Mr. Verb said...

I think we'll all keep an eye on your results!

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Swedish: "Varför dödade du din fru?"