My grandfather (born late 1890s, New Yorker) had this thing he always used to say:
Ilch, where’s your lunch?
In the original aboriginal, it takes a soft sound of “g.”
I’ve parroted it all my life, but I have no idea where it came from or what it means. He used to go to plays a lot, so it might be a quotation from some long forgotten play. I’ve tried Google, but I didn’t turn up anything promising. It’s such a random quote that I don’t even have any idea how to go about looking for it. Any ideas?
I wish I could give you a specific context, but I was too young when he died to have thought about it. My mother has no idea, and no one else is left to ask who might have known. He was saying it when my mother was a child (late 1930s) and I remember him saying it when I was a child. He died in the 1970s. It must have had some kind of context, since he probably didn’t just pop up with it at random–but no one has any idea what the context was, or what prompted him to say it. As far as I was concerned, it was just one of those things old people said, like “oh dear” or “my my.”
Is “Ilch” your name, or is the word part of your grandfather’s exclamation? Did he have an ethnic background worth mentioning (e.g., Yiddish, Russian)?
I hope Alto will come back and clarify the question. Very little of it is intelligible to me.
Is he asking what “Ilch” means?
Is he asking why the grandfather queried about lunch in contexts having nothing to do with lunch?
Where does any sort of “g” appear in the quote?
When were 1890’s New Yorkers referred to as “aborigines”?
I wish I could answer any of your questions. (I’m a she, by the way.) The things that you’re saying don’t make any sense are all part of the original quote–and they don’t make any sense. I quess I wasn’t clear about how much of my message was the quotation. In full, it is:
“Ilch, where’s your lunch?
In the original aboriginal, it takes a soft sound of ‘g.’”
I have no idea who Ilch is. No one I know has a name or nickname anything like it. I can only guess the saying is supposed to mean that the sentence “Ilch, where’s your lunch?” when spoken in some aboriginal language–clearly not English–has a soft “g” sound. But why anyone might want to say this, or what the language is, I don’t know.
My grandfather had a German Jewish background, but he was born and raised in New York.
It’s certainly possible that it had a purely private significance known only to my grandfather, in which case I’ll never know, and I’m just wasting everyone’s time–but it’s been mystifying me for years, and I just wondered if it might have some kind of resonance for someone else.
I still don’t understand. What part of “Ilch, where’s your lunch?” has a soft "g’ sound?
And what do you mean when you say “the original aboriginal”? Do you mean Native American?
aboriginal
Function: noun
Date: 1767
1 : first or earliest known inhabitant especially as contrasted with an invading or colonizing people
2 : often capitalized : of or relating to the indigenous peoples of Australia
So the grandfather was saying the whole thing, both phrases…
FWIW I think, since he had some german backround, he might be saying that they used to pronounce the end of lunch like “Ilch” (the soft sound of ‘g’, kinda like between ‘g’ and ‘h’).
Or maybe he was a spy and that was the secret phrase to abort the mission…
Älchen is the german name for the “ch” combo of letters. Normally pronounced with a k sound by the germans I believe.
Anyway sounds like a simple rhyme for remembereing how to pronounce ch, as with a soft “g” like sound as is found in the word aboriginal.
I think Rhapsody has it (Darn those hamsters for eating my earlier post saying the same thing!)
The Ilch/Lunch and Original/Aborignal combos make it sound like a meaningless speech device that perhaps was used by European immigrants in New York in the early/mid 1900’s.
As a comparison, my grandfather perennially tries to learn Spanish, and uses the following phrase to practice his “rolling r’s”:
“The perro de San Ramon no tiene rabo”
It means nothing; it’s just for learning to pronounce sounds not present in the English language. Maybe your grandfather had immigrant friends/family that used the phrase practicing English, and he picked it up as a non sequitur?
