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Comment by B1FF_PSUVM | Hacker News Reader

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B1FF_PSUVM

Fake. Not a totally bad fake, but many of the manglings are wrong.

For instance (p.58) "In the country of the blinds" should be "In land of blinds", and no plural in man or king either.

No "Castles in Spain", either, it's "castles in the clouds".

Might be the work of a bored Englishman ...

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That's quite a conclusion you've reached with such little information. One of the points stated is that it might have been translated to French and then English, but not information on what exact dictionary might have been used. A lot of dictionaries will, though, give you a lot of possible translations for the same word, that combined with the necessity of grammatically putting them together could create such a messy non-sensical work... or it could be fake, who knows.

Both of your examples are exactly what you'd get if you literally translate from Portuguese to French and from that to English.

It's kind of hard to make "castles in Spain" appear in any literal translation, if the wording in the source language mentions the clouds instead of Spain.

On the other hand, an Englishman would say "castles in Spain" ...

Same thing with land vs. country, although not so clear cut. The mangling is being done by someone who knows the English idioms, not an ignorant native who cannot even get basics like articles and plurals right.

Apparently he knew the English version of that one (or, as rodelrod said, he just translated the French translation from a Portuguese-French guide. That would somewhat explain the strange word "Espagnish").

In the original: Fazer torres de vento -- To build castles in Espagnish

There are several like that:

Tomar o ceo co' as maos -- Take the moon with the teeth

Ter memoria de gallo -- To have a hare memory

Comer o pao que o diabo amassou -- To eat of the cow mad (!?)

You should update the Wikipedia article with your findings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke

"Original research" is banned.

This isn't original research anymore, since there's a Hacker News source. You can link to this thread as proof.

Indeed. Say you want to change Wikipedia to better reflect your whims and opinions. (1) Post your notions on Hacker News. (2) Cite the HN comment from Wikipedia. I'm not recommending people do this, I'm just saying you could.

Umm no you can't. Hacker News comments are not considered reliable sources [0] because they are self-published [1]. The only exceptions would be if the subject of the article is talking about themselves, or if the commenter is an established subject expert. (Not meaning that they have a degree in it or are good at their job, but are widely considered an expert such as Dennis Ritchie on C) Even then the former is only meant for specific cases [2] and higher quality sources are always preferred. If any average joe could talk on a topic and include their opinion in Wikipedia because it was "published", it would not be the high quality resource it is today and that is also why the concept of what makes a reliable source isn't so intuitive.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Rs

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SPS

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SELFPUB

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