I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original.
I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original. It was first published in 1855 as The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English by Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. The presumption was that they used a Portuguese-French phrasebook and a French-English dictionary. The book I knew until this week was the ‘fourth edition’ published in 1884 by Field and Tuer at the Leadenhall Presse, as an intentionally funny exercise. It included only selections from the thematic word-lists provided by the original, so that under ‘Fishes and shell-fishes’, for example, we find: ‘Calamary, Dorado, A sorte of fish, Hedge hog, Large lobster, Snail, Wolf, Torpedo and Sea-calf.’
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