What language does Lewis Carrolls gibberish in “Jabberwocky” most resemble?
I’ve seen the poem translated into French and German. The German translation captures the rhythm of the words, and their tone better than the French does. (The German word for “jabberwock” was “Jammerwoch”, among other things.) I can’t say for sure whether this is the closest linguistically speaking to the original text, or if Lewis Carroll had any specific language in mind when he wrote the poem. The translations make up a curious chapter in Douglas Hoffstadter’s book on artificial inteligence and strange loops “Gdel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”.
