Reverse Yaourt

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This morning, Thierry Michel sent in a link to the "soundtrack opening and theme" from the 2016 TV Movie Maigret Sets A Trap, which he describes as "a french-sounding song that actually makes no sense in french, something that was called 'yaourt' back in the 60s when french singers did the same with English (you wrote a few posts on that already on LL)":

The IMDb page for the movie says that the music is by Samuel Sim, but offers no details about the song or the singer. The theme music is also available on Sim's Soundcloud page, and a comment indicates that the singer is Tracy Kashi, but requests for the lyrics in the comments go unanswered.

Past LLOG yaourt coverage:

"Yaourter", 7/21/2009
"Chanter en yaourt", 9/20/2009
"Prisencolinensinainciusol", 10/25/2009
"Yoghurt medley", 7/23/2010
"How Sid Caesar learned double-talk", 2/13/2014

Update — in the YouTube comments, someone offers this hypothesis about the lyrics:

La-bas le chat est sur le toit
Le chien chasse dans la rue
L'oiseau, il vole dans le ciel
Et moi vois tout la tout
Mais toujours
La-bas toujours
Quelqu'un regarde moi
Toujours
La-bas toujours
Quelqu'un regarde vous

 



9 Comments

  1. V said,

    March 20, 2018 @ 10:44 am

    what's the etymology of yaourt? To me it only means the package manager for Arch Linux.

  2. Markonsea said,

    March 20, 2018 @ 11:16 am

    Yaourt is the French word for yogurt – nothing more, nothing less. (In the original Turkish, the diacriticised g, often transcribed "gh", is not pronounced.)

  3. WAT a guy said,

    March 20, 2018 @ 5:09 pm

    These days in Turkish "ğ" is pronounced as a lengthening of the preceding vowel, but I remember when I was a kid there in the 1960s that a few people, mostly elderly ones, pronounced it as a very slight fricative.

  4. Adrian said,

    March 21, 2018 @ 7:57 am

    The lyrics suggested in the YT comments seem to match/work pretty well, even though there are complaints that they're not yer actual French.

  5. Robert Coren said,

    March 21, 2018 @ 9:56 am

    So does this mean that there's no pronounced consonant between the last two vowels in the name of the president of Turkey?

  6. Rod Johnson said,

    March 21, 2018 @ 12:44 pm

    It does.

  7. AntC said,

    March 21, 2018 @ 5:21 pm

    Did anybody see the movie? I'm finding it hard to imagine Rowan Atkinson as Maigret.

    Would he have the gravitas of Charles Laughton or Rupert Davies or Michael Gambon? Those 1960's TV adaptations were sooo atmospheric.

  8. Ed M said,

    March 21, 2018 @ 6:37 pm

    @AntC it's not a movie — it is a series comprising two 2-episode stories. I thought Atkinson would remind me of Mr Bean throughout, but he was very good and believable in the role.

  9. ThM said,

    March 28, 2018 @ 6:55 am

    Yes, Atkinson is a good Maigret, and the words "chat", "toi", "là-haut" can be heard, sort of. They still don't really make recognizable lyrics to me.

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