Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating dead languages
These translation issues will be familiar to anybody learning a current, very much alive language, especially if you're reading informal forums (say, Youtube comments). You have the same types of abbreviations, more-or-less voluntary misspellings and jokes or references that only make sense from a certain cultural standpoint.<p>I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.<p>For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.