Saturday: Hili Dialogue

October 26, 2013 • 2:59 am
Hili: Have you read Jerry’s piece about ants?*
Malgorzata: Of course, after all, I did translate it.
Hili: I wonder if he had any common ancestor with the anteater?

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In Polish:

Hili: Czytałaś ten artykuł Jerrego o mrówkach?
Małgorzata: Oczywiście, przecież to ja go tłumaczyłam.
Hili: Zastanawiam się, czy on miał jakiegoś wspólnego przodka z mrówkojadem?

____________

My piece on the evolution of ants is here; Malgorzata’s Polish translation for Racjonalista is here. Hili doesn’t seem to know yet that all species are related and had a common ancestor at some point in time. If she checked the wonderful Timetree site, she’d learn that humans and anteaters had a common ancestor about 104 million years ago.

Use that site, by the way, to find the divergence time (with scientific references) for any pair of species, entering them in the two boxes in the upper left at the site.

n.b.: I am “Jerrego”!

10 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili Dialogue”

  1. I wonder what Hili thinks about the comon ancestor of humans and cats who lived 94.2 million years ago.

    I love the “Hili Dialogues”!

  4. To a native English speaker, “ant” is not at all what I would have expected the translation to be for, “mrówkach.” I would have expected mouse, or cricket, or lizard, or something that cats actually catch.

    …or maybe Polish cats catch ants, or don’t say, “mrow”?

    Cheers,

    b&

    1. You would probably recognize mouse – mysz, but not cricket – świerszcz, nor lizard – jaszczurka. And no, Hili does not catch ants and she says “miau” in Polish.

      1. Ah, so Polish cats can talk to German cats, no translators needed. Just like in this children’s song:
        Miau, miau hörst du mein Schreien,
        Miau, miau ich will dich freien…
        Meow, meow hear my shouting,
        Meow, meow I want to woo you…
        😉

      2. Crickets as Swiss cheese, and lizards as jacuzzis! At least Baihu and Hili would be able to talk with each other, even if it’d take me lots of study just to get up to “Where is the restroom?”

        I’m’a gonna hafta study these Dialogues much more closely, methinks….

        (I’m also wondering if anybody’s studied if cats have regional accents, perhaps influenced by the accents of their slaves. Could it be possible to place a cat on a map based on a recording of its vocalizations, the same way that we can do with humans?)

        b&

  5. Polish has got to be one of the most opaque languages written with the Latin alphabet.
    Knowing French and some Latin and German, I can usually spot enough words in a lot of languages to at least figure out the subject, or even “read” a menu.
    Hopeless in Polish!

  6. I’m pretty impressed that such technical posts as the ant one get translated. My biology being so rusty, I had to concentrate hard in English at parts…

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