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Vy Go Vhale Vatching?

Last Monday my brother and I went sea kayaking with a Whale Watch Tour Group. On this Whale Watch Tour, we watched: Germans!

Did I say "Germans"? No, we actually watched whales, although there were a great many Germans on the Whale Watch Tour, and we watched them and the whales with equal interest. Germans and whales are very similar, or so I am told. In my Flartenugel's German Whale Watcher's Guide, it says that "Whales are often seen cavorting in the biergartens of Munich.dancing fluke in fluke while drinking huge steins of Gunkeloberstrassendorferreinholdgefunkeinmitzel and festooned in brilliant green lederhosen." Which is all true, except for the parts about the biergartens, Munich, the steins of Gunkelwhatever, and the green lederhosen. Oh, and the dancing.

As you can tell from the above paragraph, German is a funny language. For example, as our Whale Watch Tour Kayaks crept up on four whales that were just ahead, the German Whale Watchers began to shriek "Vier! Vier!", which in German may mean "Whales! Whales!", or perhaps "Veer away from those four whales before you run them over, you gelumpenstrudel!"

You will notice that I have taken a free hand with the translation. If English grammar followed the same rules as German grammar, the word "vier" would be translated: "Away from these beforeyourunthemover whales four, veer, gelumpenstrudel you."

See? German is funny! Ha-ha!

Egyptian is another funny language. Although I don't speak Egyptian especially well, I am sure it is funny because when written it looks like cartoons. For example, a sentence in German such as: "Behanden mich meine bierstein!" may be translated into Egyptian as: "One-dimensional brown man wearing a dress elbowing one-dimensional yellow naked man in his gelumpenstrudel."

Sadly, there is no word in Egyptian for "whale". It took the average Egyptian stonemason three months to chisel the word for "teeny nick in the rock", so the word for "whale", which would have resembled a life-sized one-dimensional yellow whale, forever eluded Egyptian scribes.

Which is hard to imagine, really, because whales are very distinctive animals. Whales can be readily distinguished from other animals by: size! Yes, size alone will enable you to recognize the average whale, which will come in handy if you are ever in Egypt and you cannot tell which humpbacked animals are, say, camels and which humpbacked animals are whales.

But you will be glad, when you are on a Whale Watch Tour with a gang of shrieking German Whale Watchers, that Egyptian stonemasons are not paddling about.chiseling away furiously at their stone tablets and howling: "One-dimensional humpbacked naked yellow man high-fiving one-dimensional brown whale-headed German!" Which means, in Egyptian: "Whale watching is cool! But get your elbows out of my gelumpenstrudel!"
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