The original phrase (“Ceci n’ est pas une image.”) slightly resembles French. But it looks broken. Wrong.
And in my culture (Eastern Europe) there is a rather famous French phrase from a rather famous book. The book character, who slightly knew French, tried to concatenate a sentence “I haven’t eaten in 6 days”. But because that phrase was written in the book in transliteration method and French spelling is completely unintuitive for those who doesn’t know it, I remember only the pronunciation (and not in an exact form!) of the phrase.
So, in total, my answer was a random French phrase (“I haven’t eaten in 6 days”) written in universal Latin-like spelling by memory from a book’s intentionally wrong sentence.
Even more total: I answered to something that looked like a distorted French phrase with a random distorted French phrase.
I’m always curious about strange language related jokes and know quite a bit of French, yet this joke eludes me. Care to explain?
Well, it is almost impossible.
The original phrase (“Ceci n’ est pas une image.”) slightly resembles French. But it looks broken. Wrong. And in my culture (Eastern Europe) there is a rather famous French phrase from a rather famous book. The book character, who slightly knew French, tried to concatenate a sentence “I haven’t eaten in 6 days”. But because that phrase was written in the book in transliteration method and French spelling is completely unintuitive for those who doesn’t know it, I remember only the pronunciation (and not in an exact form!) of the phrase.
So, in total, my answer was a random French phrase (“I haven’t eaten in 6 days”) written in universal Latin-like spelling by memory from a book’s intentionally wrong sentence.
Even more total: I answered to something that looked like a distorted French phrase with a random distorted French phrase.
Wow, thanks for the explanation!
There’s also the
EscherMagritte picture of a (smoking) pipe, captioned “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”.It’s by Magritte
Oops! Thank you :-)