Food Glorious Food

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This is how I work.

At about 1am, just as the parents, the dogs and the parrots were settling down for a night's sleep, I went on youtube to satisfy a minor curiosity.

Rammstein are a German industrial synth-and-rock-guitar band, possibly most famous for the song "Mein Teil", inspired the Meiwess cannibal case. The Pet Shop Boys did a popular remix, and I wondered vaguely whether there was a video for their remixed version - though actually I prefer the original. It turns out there is a video.

Watching it, I thought "Why don't I try translating this into Esperanto?". Mein Deutsche ist nicht zehr gut...but with the aid of some basic German and different English translations, I came up with a first draft.

Now, the chorus runs:

Denn du bist
Was du isst,
Und du wist
Was es ist.
Das ist Mein Teil.

Which means:

Because you are
What you eat,
And you know
What it is.
This is my part.

And translates literally into Esperanto:

Cxar vi estas
kiu vi mangxas,
Kaj vi scias
kiu gxi estas.
Tiu estas mia parto.

(The letter x here indicates a circumflex - hat character (^) - over the preceding letter. I haven't got around to setting up my system to be able to type the proper letters easily.)

If the chorus is the heart of the song, I think the translator should make a special effort to translate it accurately. So I need to find some Esperanto words that rhyme with either Mangxi (to eat) or Esti (to be), that preserve some of the sense of the original.

What I need is an Esperanto rhyming dictionary. I haven't got one. So I'll have to make one. But which existing dictionary do I make it out of?

The Baza Radikaro Angla (Basic Stemlist with English translations) is good but too limited. I need to translate words like "porcelain" elsewhere in the song, so I need a larger list. This one is an extended version which is easily reformattable, so that's what I used.

So by judicious use of search-and-replace on a wordprocessor and tab delimitation on a spreadsheet, I got a nice clean list of 3000 word stems. It's generally reckoned you can get ten useful words from each stem, so that should be enough meaning to be going along with.

Except they're not in rhyming order - they're in alphabetical order. Esperanto is phonetic, so I need to find a way to sort them alphabetically from the end of the stem, instead of the beginning. If my spreadsheet were sensible, it could do this. But it's not so it can't.

Still with me? I need to write a little program to create a second column of stems, but reversed, so the spreadsheet can sort them alphabetically, thus putting the right-way-around list in rhyme order. Simple!

I haven't been a programmer since 1994, and the only language I can remember how to use is BASIC. I was always a bit useless at C++. So I find and download QBASIC. And spend an hour reminding myself how to use it. And then another hour debugging the program, only to find it's the input file, not the program which is the problem.

This is the text of my first program in around fifteen years. It's not terribly elegant.

CLS
b$ = "____________________"
OPEN "h:\r2a.txt" FOR INPUT AS #1
FOR c = 1 TO 5000
OPEN "h:\r3.txt" FOR APPEND AS #2
INPUT #1, r$
FOR c2 = 1 TO LEN(r$)
MID$(b$, c2, 1) = MID$(r$, LEN(r$) - (c2 - 1), 1)
NEXT c2
c$ = LEFT$(b$, LEN(r$))
PRINT r$, b$, c$, c
PRINT #2, c$
CLOSE #2
NEXT c
CLOSE #1

...but it works. And now I have my Esperanto rhyming dictionary.

Now, what rhymes with Mangx(i)?

Arangx(i) - To make arrangements
Orangx(o) - Orange (fruit)
Sxangx(i) - To change something

And what rhymes with Est(i)?

Best(o) - Animal
Modest(a) - Modest
Cxe-est(i) - To be right here
Fest(o) - Holiday
Gest(i) - Gesture
Digest(i) - Digest food
Sugest(i) - Suggest
Majest(a) - Majestic
Kest(o) - Box
Nest(o) - Nest
Honest(a) - Honest
Tempest(o) - Storm
Rest(i) - To stay
Arest(i) - To arrest
Krest(o) - Crest of a bird
Forest(i) - To be elsewhere (not Forest!)
Atest(i) - To officially claim
Intest(o) - Intestines
Kontest(i) - To dispute a claim
Protest(i) - To disagree
Vest(o) - Any article of clothing

So do I have a sense-preserving rhyme for "Because you are...what you eat"? Several! Like:

Cxar vi estas
Kiun vi digestas.
Sentu tempesto
En vi intesto.

"You are what you digest. Feel the storm in your insides."

It's now eight in the morning. Time for breakfast.

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