![]() This would suggest the person who produced this is unfamiliar with both English and Arabic. I got laughed at in my introductory Arabic class for saying my brother's name was 'Piss' – the name Paul is typically written as Latin-derived بولس (Bulus/Paulus) partly to avoid this. Whether known to the perp or not, another fascinating sidenote is that بول (/boul/) is the Arabic word for urine. Filed by Ben Zimmer under Lost in translation.But who knows? Maybe the buffet sign is just a sly cross-linguistic wink from an Iraqi Beatles fan. And I suspect that Google's statistical approach to automatic translation is being misled by the frequency of the phrase "Paul is dead" in texts involving the persistent urban legend that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966. Google Translate can be ill-equipped to recognize such distinctions between translation and transliteration. Thus, "بول" could be a transliteration for either ball or Paul. ![]() Second, since Arabic traditionally lacks the /p/ phoneme, loanwords with /p/ tend to be written with the letter for /b/, namely ب. So "ميت" is a fine transliteration for English meat /mi:t/, but it could also represent the Arabic word mayyit 'dead' (derived from the verb māta مات 'die'). ![]() First, Arabic text usually dispenses with the diacritics for short vowels known as ḥarakāt, leaving only long vowels represented. The mistranslation is facilitated by a couple of aspects of Arabic orthography. ![]() Then another person, unaware that this was a transliteration and not a translation, must have run "ميت بول" through Google Translate (or another online translator) to arrive at " Paul is dead." ![]() How did this happen? First, someone had to transliterate meat ball into Arabic, with meat becoming "ميت" and ball becoming "بول". From Ajam Media Collective's Facebook page, a surprising buffet sign at Erbil International Hotel in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan:Ī buffet sign reads "ميت بول" ("MeatBall") transliterated into Arabic, with its translation as "Paul is Dead" in English, a literal translation of the text! The employees of the Erbil International Hotel seem not to have been aware that "Meat Ball" was not, in fact, an Arabic or Kurdish word! ![]()
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