Gort, Klattu birada nikto. Squa tront!

[Kjemperotta]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Olaf Solstrand" <harryklein at hotmail.com>
To: <dcml at stp.ling.uu.se>
Cc: <donrosa at iglou.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 9:27 PM
Subject: Gort, Klattu birada nikto. Squa tront!


> >Gort, Klattu birada nikto. Squa tront!
>
> Does these words have a meaning that the part of the list which don't
> understand ... (finnish?) should know? What on earth does it mean?
>
> Olaf

Well, this is what I found on the subject:

At EC, any time an alien spoke, it was in a Yiddish-flavored gibberish
salted with these two phrases (which became an in-joke at EC): SPA FON SQUA
TRONT

Mine is minority opinion, but these sound like Latin-ized Yiddish to me.
SQUA is very similar to the Latin preposition "qua" (as in "sine qua non")
and SPA is obvious Roman Latin. FON and TRONT is similar to a number of
Yiddish words with the ending "on" or "ont" syllable. Most of these are
Latinate. They are loan words from the Latin-derived language of French, and
the common French suffix "-ent," is pronounced "ont." To a Yiddish speaker
in New York, perhaps nothing sounded as elegant and foreign as Latin or
French.

source:

http://www.gvny.com/columns/yaco/yaco10-1.html



- Martin S. Thoresen