Yaourter, Mondegreen, Lorem Ipsum and Pangrams

While watching an episode of the fabulous Maigret series with Rowan Atkinson, I tried to decipher the text in the theme song. Even though I speak French and can usually understand French songs, I had trouble deciphering this one. I found out that the song is not French at all, just sounds like it, as if someone who doesn't speak French, thinks he understands the words and repeats them like that.

The French have a word for it "yaourter" (to yoghurt). There is also an English word for that, usually when someone misinterprets a word in their own language. The English word is "mondegreen" and comes from the misunderstanding of the line from "The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray":
"They ha’e slain the Earl o’ Moray / And laid him on the green." which is made into "They ha’e slain the Earl o’ Moray / And Lady Mondegreen."

There is also a Japanese word that is used for the homophonic translation of songs, Soramimi.

Anyway, I thought this was so interesting that I wanted to know more.

In the meantime, there is a hypothesis about what the text could mean.

La-bas le chat est sur le toit
Le chien chasse dans la rue
L'oiseau, il vole dans le ciel
Et moi vois tout la tout
Mais toujours
La-bas toujours
Quelqu'un regarde moi
Toujours
La-bas toujours
Quelqu'un regarde vous

Which means in English more or less:
There the cat is on the roof,
the dog chases in the street.
The bird, it flies in the sky
And I see it all
But always
Down there always
someone looks at me
always
down there always
someone looks at you.

Mind you, I listened to the song again after I found the "lyrics". I don't know what accent that person is supposed to be speaking. I have talked to French people from the South of France to the South of Belgium plus Candians and Swiss from the different French speaking regions, I never heard anyone like this. 😉

While researching, I found another interesting word that I hadn't heard about but it goes with this subject: greeking.

Lorem ipsum vim ut utroque mandamus intellegebat, ut eam omittam ancillae sadipscing, per et eius soluta veritus.

Looks Latin, right? But it doesn't mean anything. Well, my Latin isn't good enough to judge whether there are roots in it that can be interpreted, as some people claim.

Publishers and graphic designers use it when they design text blocks, so they don't have to put any specif text there but can see what it looks like with a text. Also, you don't get tempted to actually read and understand the text and can concentrate on the layout.

I always thought they might use sentences like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", a pangram, or sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet. We used it when learning to type (on the typewriter) and later on when trying out whether a typewriter did actually function alright and no letter was "hanging". Nowadays, people use it to compare fonts.