A little ditty
My mum told me this little ditty in the 80s. It perplexed my Latin teacher. It's just a little novelty.... does it make sense to you?
Si ville der digo
Fortebus es in aro
Dem nobus es
Demis trux
Sit ininem
Cusandux.
Here's my version of it:
Lemme tell you a little story 'bout a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer barely kept his fam'ly fed
and then one day he was shootin' at some food
and up through the ground came a bubblin' crude...
This is an old "ditty" (I think it was on the "Today Show" 4 or 5 decades ago)
The last part is:
40 busses in a row
them no busses
them is trucks
sittin' in 'em (orig. version was "demis fula" = them is full of")
cows 'n ducks
"Si ville der digo "
Civil there they go?
"civil"? is that right
Might be "see willy, there they go"
Yep, Old timer and Obadiah take it between them :).
My mum says it in her Scottish accent, which made "cusandux" sound more natural as transliterated into broad Scots "Coo's an' ducks". She learned it from her dad, and who knows how many generations before him. Amusement was simpler back then!
Sorry to squeeze such nonsense into this rather more clever forum, but it got stuck in my mind for years, and there seems to be no reference to it on the worldwide interweb anywhere.
Here's how it sounds when not in faux-Latin:
See Willy der dey go,
Forty buses in a row.
Dem no' buses, dem is trucks,
Sittin' in 'em, coo's and ducks.
Oh, old timer, I think "demis fula" looks much better!
Seems like a got a central lowlands dialect version with free memory lapse lyric changing :).
PS this was moved to Languages Forum, but I posted in English because it's... English. Perhaps shift it back over? Unless faux-Latin is a bona-fide foreign language...