Yuval Pinter writes:
When an English speaker doesn t understand a word one says, it s Greek to me . When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it sounds like Chinese . I ve been told the Korean equivalent is sounds like Hebrew .
Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?
Well, there s a Wikipedia article on the topic Greek to me with a table of correspondences, a page at Omniglot It s all Greek to me with a similar table, and a forum thread at wordreference.com. Michael Quinion has a Q&A on the origins of the English expression, which includes the suggestion that the Spanish-American word gringo comes from the expression “hablar en griego”.