{"id":97,"date":"2006-07-06T17:43:31","date_gmt":"2006-07-06T16:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/06\/its-all-greek-to-me\/"},"modified":"2006-07-06T17:43:31","modified_gmt":"2006-07-06T16:43:31","slug":"its-all-greek-to-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=97","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s all Greek to me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When you can&#8217;t understand something, whether it&#8217;s an unfamiliar subject in your own language, or something a foreign language, you might say &#8220;it&#8217;s all Greek to me&#8221;. At least you would in English. According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldwidewords.org\/qa\/qa-gre1.htm\">World Wide Words<\/a>, this phrase comes a Medieval Latin proverb <em>Graecum est; non potest legi<\/em> (It is Greek; it cannot be read). I understand that Medieval scribes, who weren&#8217;t familiar with Greek, wrote this phrase next to any text they came across in that language.<\/p>\n<p>The equivalent phrase in French is <em>C&#8217;est du chinois<\/em> (It&#8217;s Chinese). In German the phrase is <em>Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof<\/em> (I understand  only railway station). In Czech incomprehsion is compared to a Spanish village &#8211; <em>Je to pro mne \u0161pan\u011blsk\u00e1 vesnice<\/em> (It&#8217;s a Spanish village to me). Does anybody know why?<\/p>\n<p>What about in other languages &#8211; are there any similiar idioms indicating incomprehension?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you can&#8217;t understand something, whether it&#8217;s an unfamiliar subject in your own language, or something a foreign language, you might say &#8220;it&#8217;s all Greek to me&#8221;. At least you would in English. According to World Wide Words, this phrase comes a Medieval Latin proverb Graecum est; non potest legi (It is Greek; it cannot [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}