I wonder if this has ever happened. Lemme 'splain:
When I was a kid, my dad would sing a nonsense song that went
Marzy Dotes an Dozy Dots
An little lamzydyevee
Akiddlee eyveetoo
Wuddnyoo?
I honestly thought that was something he picked up from the natives during the war in Southeast Asia. And he indicated that he himself didn’t know what it meant.
Until recently, he and I each separately realized:
Mares eat oats and does eat oats
And little lambs eat ivy . . . and so on.
Now if I had never had that realization, but went on to sing such nonsense lyrics to my kid, and she to hers, eventually it would be a complete nonsense song that once meant something. Wait long enough, and even the original lyrics would be unintelligible to a latter day speaker.
So are there any nursery rhymes or folk songs that have unwitting mangled lines in Occitan or whatever?
I read somewhere reasonably reputable (Reader’s Digest Book Of Interesting Shit You Didn’t Know But Can Bore People At Parties With or something similar) that there’s an Island in the North Sea or somewhere like that, which was occupied by British Soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars. The Islanders spoke one of the Scandinavian languages, but apparently still have a “nonsense” nursery rhyme phrase dating from that period that goes:
Jek og Jil vent op de hil/ent Jil com tamblin ofter
(“Jack and Jill”, of course).
Apparently Nursery Rhymes are really useful for Linguists and Language Detectives because they remain unchanged despite the passage of time; they get passed down as they were when they were first created even if they appear to be nonsense two centuries later.
I’d also like to add that in my office, “jivey” will be the word of the day. I’m not sure in what context, but I’ll find some way to work into a conversation.
Surrender Dorothy is correct – the original song (which IIRC, dates from the 1940s or so) had an explanation of the lyrics. You just learned the first half.
I’m sure there are any number of folk songs where the most common version is kind of garbled. The example that comes to mind is Wildwood Flower, where most versions contain at least a small dollop of nonsense, like “my mingles”:
From the time I was a child I always heard it as “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy” to begin with. It wasn’t until I saw it written that I realized it was supposed to be nonsense words. But then, I was hearing my mother singing it, not the original record.
I just wanted to note that I first learned this song from Carol and Paula on The Magic Garden out of WPIX in NYC. Every time I hear it or read the lyrics I can still see that show.
My mother spent some time in Puerto Rico as a child, but never learned Spanish (French, yes, Spanish, no). She did pick up a nursery rhyme/child’s song that she taught to me & my sister.
We did learn Spanish, and learned that the sounds she had taught us weren’t actually weren’t actually words in Spanish, especially since they started “Un bon matin” which made us think it was some kind of wake-up-in-the-morning song that had gotten garbled in through French & Puerto Rican Spanish to us.
About a year ago, through the wonders of the internet, we stumbled upon the real song which is about “Don Martin” who got the measels and died.
re: nursery rhyme lyrics and whatnot whose original meaning got lost in the mists of antiquity…
[possible Urban Legend alert]
I have heard that “eeny meeny miney moe” is a counting sequence akin to “one two three four”, and that so is “hickory dickory dock” (equiv to “ten eleven twelve” in this case).
As we all learned in American history (at least until they truncated the early years to make room for everything that happened after WW2), “Yankee Doodle” was originally sung by the British to mock the ragtag Revolutionary troops – a “Doodle” being a fool or simpleton. And “macaroni” had nothing to do with pasta; it was a term for an overly dandified style of fashion.
I came in to mention that the idea came from Cowzy tweet and sowzy tweet and liddle sharksy doisters. I read the entry a while ago, when Mairzy Doats was going through my brain.
I’d wager 9/10 of American schoolchildren couldn’t translate “Frère Jacques” for you, but it’s a ubiquitous children’s song in America.
ETA: In fact, I always thought it funny that the English version is an announcement (“Morning bells are ringing!”) whereas the French version is a command (“Ring the morning bells!”)