Neat list. I wonder how old the German expression "Polnisch rückwärts" ( Polish [spoken] in reverse) is. I wonder if it has anything to do with Reverse Polish Notation.
Google Books found an example in the 1965 book "Sprache und Humor des Kindes". However, it does not appear to have anything to do with "Polnisch rückwärts".
While the term "Polish Notation" predates 1965, including in German as "polnische Notation", it appears to be in a specialized context not related to children's humor.
The only other Google Books reference for "Polnisch rückwärts" is a 1982 reference with nothing to do with computers.
> Der Programmiersprache Forth eilt das Schlagwort „umgekehrt polnische Notation“ voraus, was ein wenig wie „polnisch rückwärts“ klingt und auf den ersten Blick meist als Rückschritt gewertet wird.
Those are the only two uses of that phrase in archive.org. By comparison, "polnische Notation" is far more common.
Could someone shed some light on the "Spanish village" thing in southern Slavic countries? Had they found the (neighboring) Turkish easier than Spanish somehow?
> According to Keber[24], the phraseological unit španska vas comes from the German phraseological unit »für jemanden spanische Dörfer sein«, which is a mixture of two phraseological units: »das ist mir spanisch« (used in reference to the Spanish
and German king Charles V, who introduced unknown customs to the German lands) and »für jemanden böhmische Dörfer sein« (Germans did not understand the names of the Czech (= »böhmisch«) villages).
The citation is 24. KEBER J, Slovarslovenskih frazemov (Založba ZRC, Ljubljana, 2011).
> "Wait!" I hear you saying, dear reader! "Whence come these villages into our discussion?" I am relying here on one of my older and more historically minded informants, a native German, who maintains that these village-oriented expressions and the familiar (and popular)
> Es waren mir böhmische Dörfer
> arise from the unintelligibility (to the speaker) of the names of the mentioned villages.