#LanguageTrivia: A common catchphrase in English language for speech or text being indecipherable to a person is - "It's all Greek to me!" [1/n]
The genesis of this phrase is often cited as dating back to 1599 when Shakespeare's Casca conspiring against Julius Caesar said, “Those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads, but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” [2/n]
However, prior to its usage by Shakespeare, English poet Gascoigne, circa 1566, while interpreting an Italian comedy into english wrote, "This geare (talk) is Greeke to me; either it hangs not well together, or I am very dull of understanding: speak plaine, I pray you.” [3/n]
A question that the phrase stirred up while speaking with @Ali_Zabaan , @MadEyeModi , @shivAwake and @@anushkajasraj at @Zabaan was this: If Greek sounds senseless to the English, what does nonsense sound like to the Greek? The answer is Chinese. [4/n]
When words are to be declared senseless, the possible sentiments are either ignorance or incomprehensibility. It emanates from a particular script "looking foreign" or "difficult" as the case was with a dense and dwindling Greek alphabet back in the times. [5/n]
Come 20th century, a game of passing a message while sitting in a circle famously came to be known as the Chinese whisper (also known as the Russian scandal/Arab phone in many parts of the world). [5.5/n] #ChineseWhisper
The connotation behind the name of a game which relied on amusement ensuing from garbled messages, was this - that the Chinese, Russians or the Arabs made no sense and their language seemed unintelligible to non speakers. [6/n]
So I went on a search for what looks unintelligible to whom (plotted in the figure below). It is ironic that Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese) is the most spoken yet most misunderstood language at the same time. [7/n] #Chinese #Mandarin #rstats #dataviz 
Language, as identity,creates a sense of belonging and makes it easy to keep the foreigner at bay. Our linguistic patterns and phrases are also not free from these biases. As a consequence,our tongues naturally find the language of our enemies as ones that can be chastised.[8/n]
This is evident in multiple cases: Hindi-Farsi, Persian-Turkish, Vietnamese-Khmer, mostly countries which share borders or have had historical links with each other. [9/n] #Persian #Turkish
In Hindi/Punjabi, the retort, “Ki main farsi bol rihain? - Am I speaking Farsi?” is matched with the response “hal ana batkallem hindi? - Am I speaking Hindi?” in Arabic. [9.5/n] #Hindi #Farsi
Hindi being the dominant language of northern “Hindustan” berates Farsi, a language that entered the country with the conquest and occupation of the Indus. [10/n] #Hindustan
For the southern peninsula of this #Hindustan, one of their languages, Telugu, is called out in the Sinhalese dialect of neighbouring island Sri Lanka as alien by saying "meka mata andara demala (this is Andhra Tamil, i.e. Telugu, to me)"! [11/n] #Telugu #India #SriLanka
For Vietnamese, the pejorative for neighboring Cambodians is “Khmer, Ting Miên” while the Cambodians call the people of Vietnam “yuon” originating from the Sanskrit word “yavana” meaning “foreigner”. [12/n] #Vietnamese #Khmer
Some funny combinations also exist - such as saying "It sounds Martian to me", or "it sounds like a Bohemian village to me" indicating it being understood as outlandish/noise. Same with chicken feet or chicken intestines,a delicacy in China but food of disgust in the west. [13/n]
It is also not surprising that one of the few languages calling nonsense "nonsense" is #Esperanto - a language curated to make international languages speak with each other easily. [14/n]
Be it the difficulty of learning a script, ignorance of learning another's tongue, xenophobia or animosity of the past, what we forget is that whether they are seen as friends or enemies, in either case, we need to know their language. [n/n]
@LanguageLog @LanguageCrawler @R4DScommunity @qikipedia @duolingo @memrise @IYIL2019 @BooksonT @flowingdata
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