Wednesday, September 07, 2005

English as she is spoke: Introduction

"This 1883 book is without question the worst phrasebook ever written. The writer, Pedro Carolino, who was Portuguese, did not particularly speak English, nor did he have a Portuguese-English dictionary available. Instead, he worked with a French-English phrasebook and a Portuguese-French dictionary. The results, I'm sure you'll agree, are staggering.

This text is that of a book of excerpts compiled a few years after the book was first published. Anything that looks like an error is, in fact, the way it actually appears in the book. I've transcribed the complete text of that book; I do not, unfortunately, have a copy of the original. I'm sure you'll notice bits that look like typos. They're not; that's all part of the fun."