Ancient Web: Zompist Collected the Strangest Sentences in Old Phrasebooks

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A travel phrasebook is supposed to prepare you for common situations. Mark Rosenfelder noticed that some guides instead prepare you for remarkably specific emergencies and social encounters.

Visit They Thought You'd Say This.

The long, text-first page begins with Rosenfelder's childhood attempt to communicate in Italian using a Berlitz book. He explains that he likes travel phrasebooks precisely because they compress so many possible conversations into a small space. He then gathers odd sample sentences from published language guides and lets their unexpected specificity do much of the comic work.

The page is a survival from an older style of personal reference publishing: one webmaster, a modest introduction, headings by language and a long accumulation of examples. It does not carry a reliable original publication date for the webpage, so a date printed on a source phrasebook should not be misread as the site's launch year.

An accidental history of what travelers were expected to say

Rosenfelder supplies book and publication details where available. His examples include a 1973 Berlitz Russian guide with phrases relating to organizations and Soviet-era social occasions; a 1976 Vietnamese book, a 1979 Welsh guide and a 1906 Hawaiian phrasebook. Those choices make the collection revealing beyond its punch lines. A model sentence can reflect the social conventions, politics, anxieties and technologies familiar when its book was published.

Other sections cover Hindi, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Yiddish, Indonesian, Polish, Korean, Chinese, Setswana, Telugu, Chechen, Somali and more. Certain items feel useful only in highly specialized circumstances. Others are entirely plausible, but oddly dramatic to encounter between the typical questions about hotels and directions.

The page cites contributor Mark Wise for several examples, reminding visitors that even a small amusement site could become a collaborative collecting project. It also links an explicitly fictional phrasebook, making a useful distinction between quoted real publications and parody invented for effect.

Readers should not treat these examples as a reliable current phrasebook. Transliterations and spelling conventions vary, and a sentence included for humor may be outdated or inappropriate. The artifact is more interesting as publishing history than as a practical travel aid.

Rosenfelder's constructed-language reference and cultural essays have separate lives elsewhere on his Zompist site. Here he collects the peculiar moments when commercially published language-learning tools reveal something about the assumptions of their own authors.

Browse the source-labeled examples by language.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.