Translate the following two sentences. Cette phrase en francais est difficile a traduire en englais. This English sentence is difficult to translate into French. I think that each is a reasonable tranlation of the other. Obviously a literal tranlation of either is absurd. My French is rusty, so I might have messed up the French sentence. The above are from Douglas R. Hofstadter's book: Metamagical Themas (A very interesting book). When Martin Gardiner retired from writing a column (Mathematical Games) in Scientific American, D. R. H replaced him with a column whose title is the same as the book he later wrote. Note that the title of the column by D. R. H. is an anagram of the title of Martin Gardiner's column.
For starters, it's anglais. Americans have a habit of converging all the nasal vowels toward en, e.g. the way we pronounce lingerie as lengeree. It's interesting how various languages have dealt with the name of ours. The Germans call it englisch, the Swedes englisk, copying our E. The Spaniards call it ingles, the Italians inglese, transcribing the vowel as I to mimic our rather odd pronunciation of the E. Hungarians call it angol, Russians angliyski, preserving the name of the Angles, the Germanic tribe that gave their name to the country, a couple of its counties, and the language.
