On Apr 11, 6:53 pm, Brian Lafferty wrote:
Chess One wrote:

If you know what it was, then you can't, so you don't look too hard, eh?

PI

I've tried running this sentence through various language translations
using the Google language tool. No luck. Can anyone out there
translate the above sentence into modern English? Thanks in advance.

P Innes' "British Language" defies translation.

My favorite comment on Mr. Innes' skill in languages:

"...Mr. Innes is certainly a
linguist of remarkable originality. As a sample (or perhaps a
campel),
he has discovered that Old English was still spoken as late as the
1800s
(which for some reason he takes to be the seventeenth century) and
indeed that the tongue is *still* spoken, a result that would astonish
professional linguists -- the sane ones, at any rate. Moreover, he
has
unearthed bits of the Latin lexicon of which Latinists were unaware --
e.g., "secuter."

"Turning to modern languages, Mr. Innes has discerned grammatical
features of which nobody else was aware in several modern tongues.
For
instance, he has discovered that English possesses a "negative case"
--
it is evidently what grammarians formerly called a "double negative"
--
and that the Russian first-person accusative and dative pronouns are
identical, a fact that would surprise speakers of the language. He
has
also found that the verbs "love" and "leave" in Russian are identical,
so that the surly exhortation "Love it or leave it" can be rendered in
Russian without changing the verb in the second clause. Finally, he
has
enriched the lexicon of modern English immeasurably with neologisms
like
"clacque," "dillitantes," "insistance," "come" as a conjunction (in
locutions like "poet come playwright"), and many others."