Pow!

November 13, 2006 5:46 PM

Language (and fighting) filter : Can anyone tell me what's being said in this video?

Comments on the fighting are welcome as well, but I'm mostly interested in what the observer is shouting at the end..."Police," maybe? If you can crank it up and tell me what the guys are saying, even better.

Oh, and what language it is, too. I found something that said that "romales" are Russian gypsies, but I don't know if that's accurate.

posted by Liosliath to writing & language (11 comments total)

Someone on the youtube version commented that they are "slovakian gypsies".

Others thought they were happy slappers. happy slapping would account for the camera.

I'm glad that they got beat up, the jerks.
posted by allthewhile at 5:54 PM on November 13, 2006

Found a partial translation of one line on stormfront.org forum, "This must happened somewhere in slovakia because the boxer told them after the action " Ešte raz a ťa zabijem "( one more time and I will kill you )."

Stormfront is a racst website, btw. I just followed the google search there.

Someone here says that the woman hells "stop fighting"
posted by allthewhile at 6:02 PM on November 13, 2006

I don't think the camera has anything to do with it, assuming you mean the camera we're watching thru (I didn't see another camera). Why? No one looks at it. I don't think they're aware of it being there.

In addition, I find it very odd that when the off camera person starts screaming (assuming they're holding the camera), no one looks up. wtf? If I just kicked someone's ass or had mine kicked and someone started yelling (whether that be "police" or whatever), I'd look up to the source. Weird.
posted by dobbs at 6:04 PM on November 13, 2006

Thanks, allthewhile, I found some of those links - but people contradicted themselves so much "...i am from Slovakia..it was not our language" that I just gave up and figured I'd ask the experts.

I don't know anything about fighting, but maybe they didn't notice the yelling above them because they were all adrenalined up and focused on the fight itself? Or it's fake, dunno.
posted by Liosliath at 6:08 PM on November 13, 2006

It is possible that if they were gypsies, their language was "bastardized" :) It would be nice to get an expert opinion because I'm curious too!
posted by allthewhile at 6:10 PM on November 13, 2006

Comments on the fighting are welcome as well

Completely mixed feelings. If someone hit my girlfriend in the face like that, I'd probably be pissed, too. But it was clearly an accident. And the guy who handed both gentlemen their asses went a bit overboard, such that he had to eventually take both of them on instead of just the offender. That was stupid. But look at his footwork, particularly after he's knocked the first one down and goes for the second guy. Definately a trained fighter.

Language guess: Hungarian.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:59 PM on November 13, 2006

Clearly an accident? Bullshit. He specifically peeked over his shoulder to time that smack. Also it was perfectly in frame, so my vote is a happy slapping attempt. That def was a boxer though, but he was suspiciously mellow on them.

Language guess: Serbo-Croatian
posted by ernie at 9:05 PM on November 13, 2006

I don't think anyone can tell what's being said here unless they're a native speaker of whatever the hell language it is, and here's a tip: if you don't know, wild guesses are not helping the poster.
posted by languagehat at 6:03 AM on November 14, 2006

You're right, LanguageHat - I was hoping that if there wasn't a native speaker (no idea about the demographics of MF), there might be someone who lived/worked in that area (or studied the language), and could make an educated guess. For example, though my husband's native language is Tamazight, he could tell you with 95% certainty if someone was from Algeria, Tunisia, or Egypt. Or if they spoke one of the other Berber languages, of course.

Then again, it's strange that the posters on the link that allthewhile mentioned have wildly varying (and firm!) opinions on what the woman is shouting - surely it's clear enough that there should be no question?
posted by Liosliath at 8:34 AM on November 14, 2006

Yeah, I overstated in my irritation: doesn't have to be a native speaker, just someone with intimate familiarity with the language. The point is that there's a huge difference between hearing it and understanding what is said because you actually know the language and hearing it and thinking "Gee, that sounds sort of like X, I think..." The latter is useless (and, to me, intensely irritating).

it's strange that the posters on the link that allthewhile mentioned have wildly varying (and firm!) opinions on what the woman is shouting

Not that strange if you've had the embarrassing experience of sitting in a coffee shop with an Italian-American friend, you trying to convince him that the waiter is speaking Spanish while he tries to convince you that the waiter is speaking Italian, each of you offering translations of bits of dialogue ("it's a weird dialect, but..."), and then it turns out that when the waiter is finally asked the answer turns out to be Greek. Uh, not that I'd know from personal experience; that happened to, uh, a friend of mine. Yeah, that's the ticket.
posted by languagehat at 9:58 AM on November 14, 2006

I don't think anyone can tell what's being said here unless they're a native speaker of whatever the hell language it is.

While one may not have a definitive answer unless they're a native speaker, as the Liosliath mentions, plenty of native speakers are apparently getting it wrong as well. You can, however, make some educated guesses. My educated guess was based on a google search of the name of the video, then narrowed down to just forum comments. Then I took samples of the comments (in non-English languages) and entered those into Google searches, and looked at the top-level domains to determine what the languages were. Hungarian is the one I came up with most.

So there.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:51 PM on November 14, 2006