Try this -
“’etzat ma klur”, in low german (Austrian, actually)
“Jetzt ist es mir klar”, in high german (Duden).
both mean, “ok, I get it.”
Both are used today - one in the local vernacular, the other in trade, or on TV. Actually, TV does more to unify language than anything else...
The US version of “High Englisch” is a midwest accent. Indiana, I think. All else is slang.
Funny thing - if you didn’t have two code talkers in WWII, put two southern hicks on the radio. It confused the heck out of the germans. GA, MS, LA - another language to them entirely.
Or, as I tell my my kids - there is no such thing as French. Just badly mispronounced peasent Latin with an attitude,
No kidding. 1976, I was a Civil Air Patrol cadet, down at the Cadet Officers School at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. One girl in our flight had an accent so thick, that some people couldn’t understand her.
Oddly enough, me, the kid from Pennsylvania, was the only one who could reliably “translate” for her. . . .
:Funny thing - if you didn’t have two code talkers in WWII, put two southern hicks on the radio. It confused the heck out of the germans. GA, MS, LA - another language to them entirely.:
I am from mississippi and have actually done this to discuss something I don’t want anyone who speaks english-second-language nearby to have a chance of understanding. All my family is from the country.... You can, with a little circular talking, make it impossible to understand for anyone who has not been around it or is otherwise not a totally fluent speaker, and even then it is hard.
Well, the high german can be read very easily as "Now is it (to) me clear", so no problem. I guess the low german is "Now it me clear". Same idea. I think "OK, I get it." is going too far in the search for a vernacular equivalent. How about, "I see." ?
The thing that puzzles me is the literal origin of Gauss's famous utterance, when he plopped his chalkboard on his teacher's desk with 5050 written on it ( ... the sum of 1 thru 100 ... ) "ligget se". This is "in his peasant dialect" according to E.T. Bell in MEN OF MATHEMATICS. I researched it, but came to no really satisfactory conclusion. As best I can tell, the "se" is "Sie", i.e. "she" so it would seem to be, "she lies", or to us, "there it lies", or as we would say, "there it is". I don't believe there is any literal meaning of "there" in the expression, however.
Try this:put Jamaican speaker with Indian speaker on conference call for week, I stayed on line to interpret as best I could. Actually one of better conference calls I have ever been on. Made for some funny times, all participants were equally amused.
Or a hillbilly.
After 18 years hubby still doesn’t understand half of what I say and I function as an interpreter between him and my dad.
[I’m bilingual...I also speak Yankee]
Excellent and I am a proud speaker of Mid-Western Standard English (American). ;-]