What does "ミヒ・マツェマティカ・イタ・ディッフィキリス・エスト, ウト・エゴ・ハウド・ポッセィン・クレデレ・アリクェン・エアン・ディスケレ・ポッセ." mean? What language is that? Google Translate claims it is Japanese but it does not give me a useful result.

Question

Martin Jansche · Accepted Answer

The language is Latin. However, since it’s expressed unusually in Katakana script, Google Translate gets confused. If you first rewrite it in Latin script as

%3E Mihi mathēmatica ita difficilis est, ut ego haud possim crēdere aliquem eam discere posse.
then Google Translate [1] can handle it just fine. Yandex Translate [2] gets the high-level meaning across as well (though the resulting translation is not as fluent).

But how did we get here? There are certain oddities in the Katakana text:

* Latin mathēmatica appears in the question as マツェマティカ matsematika instead of the more customary マテマティカ matematika. The Katakana syllable ツェ tse is especially unusual, given that there is perfectly ordinary テ te. English th in mathematics would become Katakana セ se or ゼ ze. Greek θ is usually transliterated as テ te in Japanese as well. The presence of ツェ tse is odd and unexplained.

My best guess is that ツェ tse came via Russian, where the те in математика is palatalized and the transliteration into Katakana is trying to keep distinctions between тэ, те, and че, perhaps transliterating them as テ te, ツェ tse, and チェ che respectively.
 * Katakana ポッセィン possiN is unusual as well. First, セィ si is very pedantic. The /si/ sound is usually assimilated into Japanese as シ shi. Next, the final /m/ in possim (as well as possum; is the subjunctive form possim really required in an ut clause? or is this a translation from English “that I could hardly…”) should probably be transliterated as ム mu instead. Putting this together, the expected transliteration would be ポッシム posshimu. By contrast ポッセィン shows a strange mix of being pedantic in how it transliterates /si/, but cavalier about the final /m/.
So there you have it: The language is modern scholarly Latin (presumably translated from another source language), transliterated into Japanese Katakana. The fact that you see Latin in Katakana is not the most unusual thing here; a lot has been done to Latin, English, and Japanese along related lines (Dog Latin [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Latin ], Wasei-eigo [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasei-eigo ], etc.). The particulars of the transliteration into Japanese are more unusual, suggesting the influence of an unseen third or fourth language that makes use of palatalized /t/ sounds, for which Russian is a textbook example.

1. Google Translate [ https://translate.google.com/?sl=la&tl=en&text=Mihi%20mathematica%20ita%20difficilis%20est%2C%20ut%20ego%20haud%20possim%20credere%20aliquem%20eam%20discere%20posse.%0A&op=translate ]
2. dictionary and online translation between English and over 90 other languages. [ https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=la-en&text=Mihi%20mathematica%20ita%20difficilis%20est%2C%20ut%20ego%20haud%20possim%20credere%20aliquem%20eam%20discere%20posse. ]

平岡 行雄 · Answer

That is not a Japanese pronunciation by any stretch of the imagination.

I think it's probably Latin.

However, I can't help you now, because the 'DeepL' I usually use is not yet compatible with Latin. Unfortunately.

I tried Google Translate on my mobile phone just now and it worked very well. I wonder why it didn't work when you did it by trying the sentences in Latin. Didn’t you try it in Latin?

Google Translate didn’t claim it was Japanese and gave me a useful result as you can see here right now.

(Hand-typed Latin transcription from Katakana you showed above)

Mihi Mathematica ita difficilis est, ut ego haud possein credere aliquen ean discere posse.

(Then into Japanese through Google)

数学は私にとってとても難しいので、誰もがそれを学べるとは信じられませんでした。

(And finally into English through DeepL)

Maths is so difficult for me that I couldn't believe anyone could learn it.

Chris Myers · Answer

The passage is Latin which has been transcribed into Japanese phonetic characters called katakana. It says:

Mihi matematica ita difficilis est, ut ego haud possim credere aliquem eam discere posse.

The meaning is: Mathematics is so difficult for me that I can hardly believe anyone is able to learn it.

Isn't Quora great? What are the chances of running into somebody who knows Japanese and Latin? Well, here I am! You made my day with this question.

Tatár Levente · Answer

Well, it is interesting:

Google translate: - Phonetic transcription:

Mihi matsu~ematika Ita diffikirisu esuto, Uto ego haudo possin kuredere ariku~en ean disukere posse.

It sounds like latin.

So, I tried latin (Google translate) and I obtained:

My Mazematics It's So Diffikiris, As I Can't Believe Ali Quen Heang Can Learn.

So I suppose that it is mainly latin written with Japanese characters.

Meaning:

My mathematics are so difficult, that I can’t believe Ali Quen Heang can learn.

Michele Gorro Gorini · Answer

Another transcription which uses classical pronunciation without vowel lengths, and using N for nasal vowels.

Mihi matsematika ita diffikirisu esuto, uto ego haud possin kuredere arikwen ean disukere posse.

Mihi mathématica ita diffícilis est, ut ego haud possim crédere aliquem eam discere posse.

Maths is so hard for me that I can’t believe anyone can learn it.

Jay Nabonne · Answer

Ok, so I took the above (which looks to be Japanese) and dumped it into Google translate. It came back with:

[code]Mihi Mazematica Ita Diffikiris Est, Uto Ego Haud Possein Credere Ali Quen Heang Discere Posse.
[/code]That didn’t make sense as English, even though it said it was.

On a whim, I took that and dumped it into Google translate again as source. It came back as Latin, with English translation of:

[code]My Mazematics It's So Diffikiris, As I Can't Believe Ali Quen Heang Can Learn.
[/code]which is almost readable, if you squint a bit on “mathematics” and “difficult”.

Edit: thanks to the comment from Ivan Derzhanski below, you can get a better translation of

[code]My Mazematica It's So Diffikiris, As I Can't Believe That Someone Can Learn It.
[/code]which makes more sense. Thanks!

Anonymous · Answer

Forget about Google Translate. This is Latin written in katakana. Some student complaining about mathematics being difficult.

I answered a very similar question on Quora not long ago.

J'zanne Read · Answer

It is Japanese…. it could well be something that’s come to japan from a non-English source. It looks to me [at 1st glance] like a list of names (because・) , or it could be a transcription of Latian. ウト・エゴ gets googled to uto ego… auto ego is how it sounds.

Timothy Maguire · Answer

Those are japanese characters for sure, but I suspect somebody has tried to write english using the japanese alphabet, so you should just read it as:

[code]Ego Ita sutupidusu sun Uto nunku~an poterō ean matsu~ematikan konpurehendere.
[/code]The way the japanese characters work mean you have to add in extra vowels to most english words to be able to write them at all, so the closest you can get to “stupids” is “sutupidusu”. Even so I can’t work out what they tried to write, something including “stupid”, “mathematician” and “comprehend”.

EDITED

Looking closer, I think it is not english but latin. I am not sure exactly how the latin started, but it is something like “I am too stupid to be able to understand this mathematics at all”

Mauro Flores · Answer

It is Japanese in writing but they don't make sense, so maybe it's a fictional language written down as katakana.

Joseph Foster · Answer

The language is Latin. Ratingo desu.

But the writing is in the Japanese katakana syllabary so that a given symbol represents a syllable, not a single sound segment. Where the syllable consists of a vowel only, the symbol represents not the vowel itself but the syllable that consists of that vowel only. In mos(u)to casesu, the symbol represents a consonant together with the following vowel. So if you read it as Latin, you’ll have to allow for some extra vowels that aren’t there in the actual Latin.

I cannot imagine any practical reason why anybody would waste time doing this unless they were trying to show that Latin could be written with a syllabary. Cumbersome though it be.

Syllabaries work fine for Japanese because Japanese word structure is basically #(V) C V C V…..CV#. Latin has a more complex syllable and word structure with more syllable-final consonants and more consonant clusters.

Frank Dauenhauer · Answer

%3E What does "エゴ・イタ・ステゥピデゥス・スン・ウト・ヌンクァン・ポテロー・エアン・マツェマティカン・コンプレヘンデレ." mean? Which language is that? Google Translate says it's Japanese, but it gives me no useful output. Does the first word maybe mean "ego" and the last word "to comprehend"?
It is written in Japanese script and is a “dog-Latin”¹ sentence: “Ego ita stupidus sung ut nunkuan potero ean matzematican comprehendere.” It is open to being interpreted by dog-Latin-using students. 
____________
¹ See my comment in answer to Kathy Bramley [ https://www.quora.com/profile/Kathy-Bramley-3 ], below.