"The Sound of Music" across three languages

You may well be familiar with The Sound of Music, an American musical from the 1950s loosely based on the von Trapp family's memoirs. It features a neat little song for teaching musical notes, "Do, a Deer", which has been translated into a number of languages. Let's contrast three versions - English, Japanese, and Arabic - and see what they suggest.

English	Japanese	Arabic
Do, a deer, a female deer,	ドはドーナツのド Do is for "donut" (dōnatsu),	دو دروب ومعاني Do is "paths" (durūb) and meanings,
Re, a drop of golden sun;	レはレモンのレ Re is for "lemon" (remon);	ري ربيع الأغنيات Re is a "spring" (rabīʕ) of songs;
Mi, a name I call myself,	ミはみんなのミ Mi is for "everyone" (minna);	مي مـوسيقى وأغاني Mi, "music" (mūsīqā) and songs;
Fa, a long long way to run;	ファはファイトのファ Fa is for "fight" (faito);	فا فـجر الذكريات Fa, a "dawn" (fajr) of memories;
So, a needle pulling thread;	ソは青い空 So is blue "sky" (sora);	صوتنا ملء الفضاء Our "sound" (ṣawt) is a filling up of space;
La, a note to follow So;	ラはラッパのラ Ra is for "trumpet" (rappa);	لم يزل فينا الوفاء In us is "still" (lam tazal) loyalty;
Ti, a drink with jam and bread;	シは幸せよ Si is "happiness" (shiawase)	سوف تبقى يا غناء You, O song, "shall" (sawfa) remain;
That will bring us back to Do!	さぁ歌いましょう So let us sing!	لنغنّي نغنّي.. لحن الحياة Let us sing, sing... the tune of life!

As should be obvious, the Arabic version is derived from the Japanese one (via a popular anime of the 1990s) rather than directly from the English one. However, it contrasts sharply with both in the choice of note-mnemonics. In English, each note name (well, except "la") is mapped directly to a near-homophonous monosyllabic word, taking advantage of English's relatively short minimal word length; most of these are widely familiar, high-frequency items. In Japanese, the word choices are necessarily longer and perhaps more obscure (the syllable fa is found only in relatively recent loanwords anyway), but in each case the note is mapped perfectly to the first syllable of a single word, usually referring to something readily visualisable. In Arabic, the note is again mapped (increasingly approximatively) to the first syllable, not of a word, but of a 2-4 word phrase; not a single one of these phrases refers to anything concrete enough to visualise. High-flown slogans replace the original's homely whimsy.

I have no way of proving it, but I believe this is symptomatic - certainly of the Arabic dubbing in the cartoons I used to watch in the early 1990s, and plausibly of Modern Standard Arabic discourse in general: an imagination based on recitation rather than visualization, preferring stirring abstractions to concrete details. After all, concrete details travel poorly in this diglossic context.

Center-embedding and Japanese

Lately I've been reading some of John Hawkins' A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency, which puts forwards some very appealing ideas about how to predict the relative frequency of different word orders (both cross-linguistically and within a language) by quantifying how easy they are for humans to parse. (For example, he derives such phenomena as Heavy-NP shift, the relativization hierarchy, and even the relative frequency of the six possible basic word orders SVO/SOV, VSO, etc.) Parsing issues certainly severely affect the grammaticality of sentences, as people who follow titles posts Language Log authors write have know.

I tried out a similar example in Japanese on a friend - going by the grammar books, one would expect "John said Mary thinks Bill came" to be translated as "Jon-wa Merii-ga Biru-ga kita to omou to itta", with three successive subjects followed by three successive objects. She unhesitatingly went for, as I recall, "Biru-ga kita to Merii-ga omou to Jon-ga itta" - moving the subjects to the "wrong" places to make the sentence processable - and said that the three-successive-subject one was "difficult". I can't think of any Arabic parallels offhand - postverbal objects and resumptive pronouns in relative clauses together stop most of the obvious possibilities - and Sylheti turns out to rather cleverly block almost (not quite) all possible ways in which problematic center-embedding might emerge. So my question to you is: in your language, can you think of similar examples of incomprehensible yet nominally grammatical sentences?