Room Service (RS): “Morny. Ruin sorbees”
Guest (G): “Sorry, I thought I dialed room-service.”
RS: “Rye…Ruin sorbees…morny! Djewish to odor sunteen??”
G: “Uh…yes…I’d like some bacon and eggs”
RS: “Ow July den?”
G: “What??”
RS: “Ow July den?..pry, boy, pooch?”
G : “Oh, the eggs! How do I like them? Sorry, scrambled please.”
RS: “Ow July dee bayhcem…crease?”
G: “Crisp will be fine.”
RS : “Hokay. An San tos?”
G: “What?”
RS:“San tos. July San tos?”
G: “I don’t think so.”
RS: “No? Judo one toes??”
G: “I feel really bad about this, but I don’t know what ‘judo one toes’ means.”
RS: “Toes! toes!..why djew Don Juan toes? Ow bow inglish mopping we bother?”
G: "English muffin!! I’ve got it! You were saying ‘Toast.’ Fine. Yes, an English muffin will be fine.
RS: “We bother?”
G: “No…just put the bother on the side.”
RS: “Wad?”
G: “I mean butter…just put it on the side.”
RS: “Copy?”
G: “Sorry?”
RS: “Copy…tea…mill?”
G: “Yes. Coffee please, and that’s all.”
RS: “One Minnie. Ass ruin torino fee, strangle ache, crease baychem, tossy singlish mopping we bother honey sigh, and copy…rye??”
G: “Whatever you say”
RS: “Tendjewberrymud!”
G: “You’re welcome.”
Probably better than my pronunciation of Hindi would ever be. Now I’m hungry for eggs, bacon and an English muffin. With bother.
Mmmm…I miss bother on my tos.
Back in the day, I took a class in phonetics, and the teacher would write a word or phrase on the board in the phonetic alphabet and we’d have to “translate” it into English. He’d pick some doozies, trying to get us to grok that what we see might be nothing like what we’ve come to expect from spelling. I think my favorite was (adjusted for the lack of the phonetic alphabet):
I’ll give you a hint. It’s more than one word, and it’s a question.
It’s:
“Did you eat yet?” in a Midwestern dialect.
Really. Try it out loud.
You probably would not be working in Mumbai, pretending your name is Rajish either.
Copy?
This was a running dialog in my dormitory days at college:
Dzhjeetjet?
Nojoo?
Noskweet!
I was a Theatre major in college and took a speech course that included phonetics and we were taught the IPA (International Phonetics Alphabet). The teacher, who was also the head of the Theatre Department, started putting up departmental announcements and signs in IPA and we usually ended up having to translate them for everyone else. He would occasionally throw in a curve, like “Oh, that this too, too, solid man would melt, thraw, and resolve himself into a dew.”