how to drive a languagey person utterly crazy, in four steps

[ysobel]

1) Before they enter the room, write on the whiteboard the first two lines of "I'm a little teapot" and their apparent translation into another language

2) While she is busy using her phone to see if one or two of the words are plausibly Portugese, erase the whole thing so she can't write the rest of it down

3) ???

4) Profit.

Argh. And the first two steps were done by different people (2 was the chorus TA who needed to write instructions for the class) and I have no fucking idea who did step 1 or what language they are using.

Here is what I know:

* It is a language related to Spanish (which is why I tried Portugese first despite the lack of nasal vowelly ~ things [e.g. mão])
* The first two words -- presumably the translation of "I am" -- were iou sao
* The word that looked related to pequeño came before the unknown word I assume is teapot (though that could be an artifact of word for word translation)
* The next word was baxa

Here is what I don't know:
* the other words
* what language it's in
* argh

Now, the Spanish translation would be something like "(yo) soy una teterita, pequeña y fuerte" or similar; possibly "yo soy una pequeña tetera, bajo y (mumble)" is the closest analogue to what was on the board, presumably using bajo to avoid repetition. So as I said, somewhat related (yo/iou, soy/sao, baja/baxa) but not the same.

And ... that's where I get stuck.

Wiktionary says that baxa can be Asturian, and iou can be Aromanian, and --

-- oh good grief I conflated iou and sao and looked up sou instead (which is an old French copper coin can be among unrelated things a) Catalan but only as 2pl form of the verb ser, b) a nonstandard spelling for Romanian, or c) Portugese.). sao, otoh, is a nonstandard spelling of a Mandarin word, or Vietnamese for "why" or for "star", which is unhelpful --

-- Except that Asturian and Aromanian are hardly common languages, and Portugese isn't what I'm looking for, if only because I is eu and the relevant word for short is baixo.

Now, there *is* a minor possibility that I wrote the three known words wrong, but I don't think so.

Grrr.

Comments

[patchwork_owl]

Could it be Esperanto? I've only seen it written a couple of times, but I remember it looking like sort of Spanish and sort of Portuguese.

[ysobel]

Nope, checked that :/

[ghoti]

Is it possible that it's an Anglicization of a non-Latin alphabet?

[zhelana]

google translate has a "detect language" setting if you type what you know into it.

[ysobel]

Yeah, but pasting in "iou sao baxo" got gtrans going "Okay that translates from "detect language" into English as iou sao baxo" and a suggestion of "Did you mean iou sao baixo", which, when I clicked on it, did detect Galician ... but only for that word ("iou sao under").

At least google is as baffled as I am? :D

[zhelana]

lol. Maybe it's not a real language.

[exor674]

Or maybe the person who wrote that up there had no idea what they were doing!