Maishuno!

March 18, 2005 4:54 PM

Simlish as 21st-century Grammelot?I love Simlish. Never heard of Grammelot, before now, but, well, as they say "Hoh! Abba Da No!"
posted by WolfDaddy (13 comments total)

crappyla et poopismellis metto in grammo huh?
posted by snsranch at 5:45 PM on March 18, 2005

My favourite was the Action Movie trailer in The Sims:

DAS STEEDELOUS PAP --- GOBIDDAH.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 5:50 PM on March 18, 2005

If anyone is interested in meeting the Jester repeatedly mentioned in the "grammelot" link above, his web site is here: Alex the Jester On his site he explains a bit about the language he speaks on stage.

(Oh, and by the way, he's also my neighbor! Nice guy. He speaks English in real life.)
posted by evoo at 7:03 PM on March 18, 2005

If you play Sims enough, you get strange phrases in your head that you can't explain. "Aruba da schna?" drove me crazy for weeks.
posted by artifarce at 7:50 PM on March 18, 2005

Simlish dictionary?

Word: Sheb sheb! Abfladaah!
Used by: Male Adult Sim
Used when: Conversation at dinner or over chessboard.
Possibly means: That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it!

I wonder how long Mr. Non-player Sim will last on MetaFilter.
posted by Lush at 8:18 PM on March 18, 2005

I found this passage on Grammelot quoted in Language Log to be daft folklore sociolinguistics:

Grammelot ... could express general ideas and it engaged people's imaginations. It also turned out to be very practical because:

1. Villages were remote centuries ago. They were separated by dark woods. The terrible roads made it was hard to leave town, and without TV or radio, the peasants of one village may never hear the accent of the people in the next town. As a result, even neighboring villages might not understand each other. Every town spoke a little differently, and so each town had their own dialect. Sometimes they spoke very differently, and had their very own language. Not surprisingly, there were far more languages then than there are today.

2. Free speech was not a right centuries ago In the days before mass media, it was the traveling perform-ers who gave peasants much of their news of the outside world. If anyone said something that angered the king or queen, he or she could easily be thrown in jail. The censors watched performers very closely. The censors were the people hired by the king or queen to make sure that nothing was said that could upset them or the royal court. If the jesters spoke Grammelot, the censors were less likely to give them a hard time, since nobody knew exactly what they were saying.

I think people of the era of Grammelot were rather more well-traveled than this stereotype indicates, and I strongly doubt that neighboring villages ever had so little contact they couldn't possibly understand each other. Note that today's Romance languages are, to a slight extent, mutually intelligible, and so is most of Scandinavia. Anyplace trade was required became a locus for language remixing, such as the Mediterranean's lingua franca.
"Language" is a useful conceit for study but local dialect changes are usually slight.

As to the second point, we wish we were so enlightened today that we could snub our forebears. More likely use of Grammelot simply absolved comedians from the travails of topical humor, which has always been just one genre of comedy.
posted by dhartung at 8:51 PM on March 18, 2005

See, this is why The Sims have completely taken over my life.

It was bad enough with the original game, but I've played The Sims 2 almost every day since it came out last year.

The language thing is brilliant, and I'll wager this one little design feature helped The Sims to become the gazillion-seller it was. Most of the conversations in The Sims sound pretty much the same, but since the player can't understand what they're saying, he/she projects whatever little storyline they've imagined onto the conversation.

The Sims are all about projection... the pure mechanics of the game are that you are guiding some guy through his shower/shave/work/dinner routine, but I guarantee most Sims players know who all of his relatives are, how his marriage/relationship is doing, and what he'll be doing socially that evening- a Sim's life is VERY busy.
posted by BoringPostcards at 8:52 PM on March 18, 2005

wing ding sessel.
posted by blacklite at 10:15 PM on March 18, 2005

dhartun "this passage ... daft folklore sociolinguistics".

Quite. It comes from a study guide (PDF) - perhaps based on Alex's own promotional material - at the Alaska Junior Theater site. While the style of such languages and performance goes way back, I have deep doubts about the antiquity of Grammelot as a specific term and specific language. As it isn't in the OED, it sure as hell isn't a long-standing English word. (I suspect it's a Dario Fo construct). In a later Language Log post, Mark Liberman adds: Stefano Taschini wrote that his Italian dictionary says it "might result from the composition of the French words grammaire, mêler, and argot", but he couldn't find it in any French dictionaries.
posted by raygirvan at 4:31 AM on March 19, 2005

I'm fascinated by this for some reason, and have spent far too much time looking into these quirky "languages" this morning. So, develop an anti-Esperanto, a language designed to hide meaning behind a traveling language? Or develop a language to use in a scenario game that uses phrases that might mean something, or not? Borrowing from the Sims dictionary: ah fweegah fwaathis is fun
posted by beelzbubba at 7:01 AM on March 19, 2005

I think the Sims language tickles the word recognition parts in our brains precisely because it's nonsense.
Which is why it's so appealing.
(I dig old-skool Simlish myself.)

(posted before)

Plaava-Loo!
posted by Smedleyman at 12:52 PM on March 19, 2005

Aha. Likely conclusion: Fo invented the term Grammalot. Either that, "or this word has somehow survived for half a millennium in the theatrical demimonde, without leaving any detectable traces in the literary and linguistic history of Italy, France and England". You decide.
posted by raygirvan at 6:16 AM on March 20, 2005

Dis grah is fredeshay!
posted by deborah at 5:45 PM on March 20, 2005