2005-02-10

Linguistic fun for journalists

I'm peeking through the daily papers from Serbia and Montenegro, and it seems that every one of them has an item about the planned marriage of Britain's Prince Charles. This is probably not because of any great enthusiasm for the royals, but because the orthographic rules in those places convert foreign names to their phonetic equivalents. This lets them run the story under the headline "Princ Čarls se ženi Kamilom," which can easily be read as "Prince Charles is marrying a camel."

5 comments:

Bora Zivkovic said...

I am still laughing....

Anonymous said...

:-))

Anonymous said...

It took me a while to figure out the author's name:
http://sodazitron.blogger.de/stories/173578/

:-)

Greetings
Novala

Eric Gordy said...

It's tough to decide whether I prefer Dzems (evokes fruit compote? pajamas?) or Dzejms (vaguely reminsicent of Western movies). Maybe just Dzimi would be fine.

Bora Zivkovic said...

BTW, the Balkania Technorati Tag is finally working for me...

P.S. Jednogrba ili dvogrba?

P.P.S. My mother says another Hello. I talked to her last night for a long time. Ivana's mother and my mother were best friends in high school - they sat together and were part of a Famous Trio of Niki, Miki and Riki.