One of my favorite novels, from the early pre-WWII of modern sci-fi, is Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. The protagonist Martin Padway is a graduate archaeology student who gets struck by lightening while strolling across the Piazza Della Minerva and finds himself thrown back into sixth century post-imperial Rome.
Fortunately he knows Latin and its development around this time, which the author says places it “somewhat more than halfway from Cicero to Dante”. (True or not? I don’t know.) He hates approaching strangers but musters up his courage and asks someone the date, speaking what he hopes is intelligible late Vulgar Latin. The man rattles off a lengthy explanation about how he thought it was Thursday but then remembered his sister-in-law’s anniversary was three days ago so it must be Friday, etc., and our poor hero doesn’t comprehend a word of it. As the author says, the man “might as well have been speaking** Trabresh**”.
Now here’s the thing:
When I first read this back in the 1970s, I was sure I had already heard of Trabresh, and that it was some strange language spoken somewhere IRL. Or at least had been spoken somewhere. But this may be the result of some sort of circular reasoning of my own, because I can’t find any references to Trabresh anywhere else. Forty years on, in other words, is it possible that reading the novel really was the first time I ever came across the word “Trabresh”, but I’ve since somehow tricked myself into believing it wasn’t?
If you never read the novel, have you ever heard of Trabresh?