Gotta say, I love some of the foreign versions better than ours: “Has the cat eaten your tongue?” and “…the mice dance” are more evocative, I think. (And the former, more akin to how I see cats behaving.)
I’d like to correct the record with regards to vietnamese here
Cat out of the bag has no literal equivalent, but there’s a phrase that has a similar effect “lòi đuôi chuột”, which means literally ‘showing the [hidden] rat’s tail’.
“đi guốc trong bụng” is not the equivalent expression for 'Cat got your tongue". It literally means “walking in one’s stomach [mind]”. Traditionally the vietnamese thought of the stomach as the center of thought, so this phrase means roughly 'knowing [someone else’s] mind".
When the cat is away: the correct vietnamese equivalent is ‘chủ vắng nhà, gà vọc niêu tôm’, which means “when the owner is away from home, the chicken will peck the earthenware pot of shrimp”. The version quoted above is ’ chủ vắng nhà gà mọc đuôi tôm’, which means “when the owner is away, the chicken grow shrimp tails”. Quite funny, actually =)
Obviously the English words were chosen for the rhyme.
When the cat’s away,
The mice will play.
I thought of that, football, but they’re not really the same I think. Still, monkey comes out of the sleeve is a good one!
In french
Don’t know an equivalent to this one
In this case, you’d ask “Did you swallow your tongue?”. However, if you can’t find the answer to a question (especially a riddle), you can “give your tongue to the cat”, so admitting defeat and asking for the answer.
Same in french, except that french mice dance instead of playing whan the cat is away. However, I think this one comes from Aesop, hence isn’t specific to a language.
Involving cats there are some others “Good cat, good rat” or “At night, all cats are grey”.
Unless they’re Spanish cats, which are all brown (de noche, todos los gatos son pardos).
Or Israeli cats – which are black… 