ketchup advisory board

Drifting by Language Log I find a note on the Ketchup Song and a link back to the Apothecary's Drawer, where a nice squib with links demystifies the genealogy of the Ketchup Song chorus lyrics, if one can rightly call "aserejè ja de jè de jebe tu de jebere seibiunouva, majavi an de bugui an de buididipi" lyrics in the traditional sense.

Having shouted myself hoarse over just this string of pseudo-Spanish during many a late night at Kaffi List, I am pleased to learn that these nonsense syllables derive phonetically from the chorus of the Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 Rapper's Delight: "I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop ... " Granted, the original text is a scant step up in terms of sense, but the phonotactic reanalysis is still amusing.

Mark Liberman at Language Log is also amused (though, yes, insufficiently European to be familiar with the Ketchup Song -- I assure him that he is not missing out on much). He compares this example of language contact to folk etymology formation like that which gives us eggcorn for acorn, but seems slightly disappointed that the semantics of both versions of the chorus are not more robust.

But note this brave attempt (duly noted at Apothecary's Drawer) to unpack the difficult line piecemeal into a Satanic message. The urge to reanalyze syllables, any syllables, into meaningful words, is a strong one.

My longtime favorite weird example of this phenomenon is the flash video "Hatten är din" (The hat is yours) with its helpful subtitles in Swedish. (For the Scandinavian-impaired, English glosses are here.) The same Eurocentrism that enables me to say "Oh yes, the Ketchup Song" of course prevents me from recognizing the original language of "Hatten." In any case the point is that the singer is not, in fact, singing Swedish words, but a Swedish speaker faced with the phonotactic subtitles cannot help but hear them as Swedish. And they are hilarious.

Reparsing language one cannot understand into language one can understand, particularly funny language, can be a powerful coping mechanism. During the war in Afghanistan, the airwaves were flooded with worrisome news full of unfamiliar placenames. Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion responded with humor, featuring on the 20.x.01 show a news report live "from the mountain province of Donundestan, from the provincial capital of Rillirillibad." The famous New Yorkistan cover of The New Yorker is another example, in which the local names are "Afghanicized." Typical, perhaps, for New Yorkers, the humor is at once literally self-effacing and yet obnoxious.

Apropos of which, I fear that I am coming to the conclusion that "Hatten er din" is a hair too far to the obnoxious side for me to enjoy as wholly innocent entertainment. I find now on the web a cottage industry in the image of "Hatten." An entire site devoted to reparsing Turkish songs into arguably sensible Swedish resides at Türkhits: Alla talar svenska! ("Everybody speaks Swedish!"). Beyond the dubious little animation on the front page, the entire phonotactic exercise is one that disarms potentially threatening Turkish (what are they singing about? are they talking about us?) by making it both comprehensible and ridiculous. The glosses erase Turkish and replace it, tellingly, with badly-accented Swedish so absurd that we can only conclude that the speakers are fools or lunatics. After all, as the title reminds us, everyone speaks Swedish -- but some clearly better than others, no?

Not a charitable analysis, I realize, and I do not wish to be misunderstood as attacking the motives of the creators of either "Hatten" or the Türkhits site. Whoever they are, I have no knowledge whatever of their intentions at any point in the creative process. Their audience, too, is probably overwhelmingly innocent in their enjoyment of the linguistic cleverness involved. I mean only to say that I find the implications of some of this 'translation' in its particular cultural context discomfiting and complicating.

But the form has promise. A clip called Daler och det hemliga vapnet a.k.a. Han teleporterar Taliban ("he is teleporting the Taliban") shows a degree of political engagement. (English gloss here.) As an apparent attempt to comment on Bush, Osama, Blair, and Afghanistan within the constraints of a relatively short and wholly predetermined set of non-Swedish sounds parsed as Swedish, this clip is an example of art in a closed frame for which I know no parallel. Surely it rivals dróttkvætt.