New Hobby

[cos]

Watching movies I already know well, dubbed in French with Hebrew subtitles.

Now where can I find more of that, other than on a plane on an international flight?

P.S. French for "Bilbo Baggins of Bag End" is "Bilbo Sacquet de Cul-de-Sac" ... and apparently Tolkien named it "Bag End" in the first place to pun on the use of the French "cul de sac" in English.

Comments

[ceo]

When my sister was in the Peace Corps in Haiti, many years ago, she saw the second Rambo movie dubbed in Creole and subtitled back into English.

[cos]

What I want is the double whammy of French listening practice and Hebrew reading practice. I'm fluent in Hebrew but my reading speed is atrocious; I can read French pretty well but I miss a lot from normal-speed spoken French.

[kirin]

I remember reading the Tolkien took a keen interest in preserving as many Hobbitty puns as possible in all the languages his books were translated into. Which is not at all surprising given his background.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It's not exactly a PUN on cul-de-sac -- it's more that, as a linguist, he was trying to work out how things would derive. He was working on Germanic equivalents of Latinate/Romance words.

The whole work is full of stuff like this. We all know that Lord of the Rings exists as an excuse to show people Middle Earth, and Middle Earth exists as a playground to come up with alt-history linguistics. And the whole thing has stuff like this. Even easy stuff that we overlook -- for instance, hobbits live in holes, which is why they're called "hobbits" -- they are "hole builders", which shortens to "hole-built", shortens to "hobbit." He did this for EVERYTHING.

[cos]

Of course it's a pun!

But I take exception to "Middle Earth exists as a playground to come up with alt-history linguistics" - just because he does a lot of that does not make it the purpose. The purpose of the world and stories he came up with (not just Middle Earth but the whole world it's in) was to hypothesize a source for all the myths of the British Isles and some of the rest of Europe; that is, to imagine what one underlying reality there might have been that could, through time and fragmented oral traditions, have led to all of the intersecting folk stories that you could collect in the 20th century.

[feuervogel]

...and suddenly holbytla makes sense. Especially if you pronounce Rohirric like it's German and the y is pronounced (sort of like) ooh.