{"id":14008,"date":"2012-09-03T20:39:34","date_gmt":"2012-09-04T03:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2012\/09\/03\/gellerese.html"},"modified":"2012-09-03T20:39:34","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T03:39:34","slug":"gellerese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2012\/09\/03\/gellerese\/","title":{"rendered":"Gellerese"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Back in March, I watched an episode of the original <cite><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mission:_Impossible\">Mission: Impossible<\/a><\/cite> TV series, which led me to look the show up on Wikipedia.<\/p>\n<p>I was amused by the paragraph about vaguely Eastern-European-esque place names and words used in the series:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Although a Cold War subtext is present throughout the series, the actual Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is rarely mentioned over the course of the series. [.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.] However, in the early years, [.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.] many of the targets appear to be leaders of fictional Slavic countries. Major named enemy countries include the &ldquo;European People's Republic&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Eastern European Republic.&rdquo; Additionally, real languages spoken in Eastern Europe are used. In the Season One episode &ldquo;The Carriers,&rdquo; one of the villains reads a book whose title is the (incorrect) Russian <cite>Na Voina<\/cite> (<cite>About War<\/cite>); police vehicles are often labelled as such with words such as &ldquo;polii\u00e7ia&rdquo; and &ldquo;poIiia&rdquo;; and a gas line or tank would be labelled &ldquo;Gaz,&rdquo; which is a Romanian translation. This &ldquo;language,&rdquo; referred to by the production team as &ldquo;Gellerese&rdquo; [after series creator\/producer Bruce Geller], was invented specifically to be readable by non-speakers of Slavic languages. Their generous use of it was actually intended as a source of comic relief.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in March, I watched an episode of the original Mission: Impossible TV series, which led me to look the show up on Wikipedia. I was amused by the paragraph&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languages","category-television"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}