Stray thought

[magid]

The term for making letters/words unreadable in photos is to "Greek" them (so there's no unintentional presentation of trademarked words, for example). I wonder if that comes from "it's all Greek to me." Which in French is "it's all Hebrew to me," so would the equivalent term in French be to "Hebrew" them?

(Of course, I've always found this ironic, since my Greek is pretty much non-existent (beyond what any mathy person has figured out about Greek letters), and my Hebrew is relatively decent, depending on the context. My French has varied over the years...)

Comments

[pinkfish.livejournal.com]

In German, it's all chinese to them. I have used "It's all Greek to me," in German, suddenly realizing that I had simply translated an idiom directly, which is usually a terrible thing to do when speaking a foreign language. My listener was Swiss, so he was particularly flexible in these things, and only told me that I should have said "Chinese", when I asked about it. Since my Chinese is even worse than my Greek (I at least know the Greek alphabet), this seemed fine to me.

When I have seen product demo screens for printing or layout software, the texts they put in to fill out the space where my text will go is always written in Latin, in the sense that it is made up of latin words; the sentenced don't make any sense. Why isn't this called "latining"?

[magid.livejournal.com]

So Germans are much more adventurous than the French, since they go much farther afield in their quest for a truly strange language that doesn't use their alphabet?

(And the English idiom just points out how large the world *used* to be...)

In re "Latining," perhaps because Latin is just being used as "text that uses our alphabet (without accents, diacriticals, etc) but is obviously not the real text"?