Of course, there are many relationships between different languages, but here, I don’t want to go into linguistic discussions about how that strange language is related to … and what … even if it could be quite interesting to me, but more about common things.

So why not start with the question how other languages are represented in our everyday life language.

Some days ago I went to a German movie (“Die neue Heimat”), where at a certain point somebody said:

Das kommt mir Spanisch vor. (That seems like Spanish to me).

In English, it is translated as:

That’s Greek to me. Or:

It’s Double Dutch.

Comparing it with other languages, one will find that many languages have this saying as well, but most of them use Chinese as the strange, unknown part, because what it is all about is to express that something is alien to us. But why those languages have been chosen to express the concept of ‘alienness’?

To me, to choose Chinese makes some sense. It is known as a very difficult language because of its distance to our western languages: the writing system, the tone system, the sentence structure, all is so different, just alien. Greek, at least, has a different alphabet, so kind of indecipherable for who has not studied it. But why Spanish or even Double Dutch? Dutch, historically spoken, seemed an incomprehensible language to English native speakers, and the German royal court did not like the ceremonies brought back from Spain by Charles V. Yet, nowadays, it sounds pretty weird considering Spanish or Dutch a completely incomprehensible language.

If Chinese is often used as the most incomprehensible language, how would this idea be expressed in Chinese? One would expect that they do it just the other way round, but no, far wrong, they go even further:

看起来像天书. (That looks like a book from the sky). Or:

听起来像鸟语. (That seems to be bird’s language). Or:

看起来像火星文. (That looks like the language from Mars).

Makes sense, doesn’t it?