Re: Newbie says hi

Padraic Brown writes:
 > --- Amanda Babcock <langs@...> wrote:
 >
 > > (Hmm, that sounds kind of like something that would
 > > be in a Pratchett book...)
 >
 > Close anyway. In one of the books he went on about
 > Place Name Customs. You know, along the lines of
 > "Great White Explorer Man barges up to native and
 > shouts very loudly in English 'What is that place?' to
 > which the native replies 'hmungdo nd amdo', which gets
 > duly noted on maps as "Mungodamo" but actually means
 > "What do you think it is, you stupid foreign git?" "
 >
 > > Amanda
 >
 > Padraic.
 >

If we're going to quote it, it might as well be an exact quote.

|The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on
|the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be
|called - in the local language - Your Finger You Fool, which was the
|literal meaning of the word Skund.
|
[I have to say, that's an impressively compact morphology]
|
|The reason for this is regrettably all to common.  When the first
|explorers from the warm langs around the Circle Sea travelled into the
|chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by
|grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark,
|speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the
|bemused man told them.  Thus were immortalised in generations of
|atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know,
|What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
|
|Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who
|is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain Is?') [...]
   Terry Pratchett, _The Light Fantastic_