Anonymous:

in japanese they don’t say “the pot calling the kettle black” they say “mekuso hanakuso o warau” which literally translates as “an eye booger laughs at a nose booger” and i think that’s beautiful

when-in-doubt-sing:

postmodernmulticoloredcloak:

whatliesbeneaththefacade:

beautiful-basque-country:

livefromvietnam:

tawagalawas:

brasilian-bs:

langsandlit:

foxlanguages:

Hey, that’s actually quite funny. *Sigh* my desire to learn Japanese is increasing too much ^^

I had no idea this kind of expression/idiom existed in other languages! I only knew it in Neapolitan… ‘O ciuccio chiamma recchie longhe a ‘o cavallo which translates more or less literally to “the donkey calls the horse ‘long ears’”. I also have no idea if this exists in Italian..?

it’s a worldwide thing i guess

we say o sujo falando do mal lavado which is something like “the grimy talking shit about the filthy”

sujo means “dirty” and mal lavado means “badly-washed” but i took the liberty to translate like i did bc i like the “words” grimy and “filthy”

In Greek we say “Είπε ο γάιδαρος τον πετεινό κεφάλα”, which means “The donkey called the rooster big-headed” 🐓

In Vietnamese we use the phrase “chó chê mèo lắm lông” aka “The dog calls the cat hairy”

In Euskara we say “zozoak beleari: ipurbeltz!” that means “the blackbird [says] to the raven: black butt!”

In Spanish, “le dijo la sartén al cazo que estaba tiznado” aka “the frying pan told the pot it was sooty”.

Not sure what the idiom was in the formal Indonesian language, but in my local dialect (Manadonese Malay) it would be translated as “says the shrimp to the crab”

@langsandlit​ I didn’t know about the Neapolitan one! In standard Italian it’s “il bue dà del cornuto all’asino” i.e. the ox accuses the donkey to have horns (in Italian “having horns” means both actually having horns and that your spouse cheats on you, I figure the expression plays on that double meaning) but there are multiple regional variations with different animals and objects. I don’t know Milanese enough to know what’s the local expression here >.<

The traditional expression from the gospels about the splinter in another person’s eye and the log in your own eye is popular in Italy too, you can hear people say things like “eeh, pagliuzza e trave!” (splinter and log).

There’s also the pretty popular expression “da che pulpito…!” i.e. “from which pulpit (the sermon is coming from)” basically calling the person a priest that condemns behaviors he does himself :p

In French we say “l’hôpital qui se moque de la charité” which means “the hospital making fun of charity"and it´s way too pompous I like the donkey ones