According to University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman speakers of English, Spanish, Polish, Norwegian and Swedish all use … Greek as a metaphor for the incomprehensibility as a language, as in “It’s all Greek to me”.

Yet, what do Greeks use to describe the incomprehensible?

It’s Chinese.

As the good professor states, the phrase hails from a medieval Latin proverb, “Graecum est; non potest legi,” or, “It is Greek; it cannot be read.”

Shakespeare immortalized the phrase in his “Julius Caesar” – “Those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me”.

Lieberman created the shown graph to depict which language other languages use to the “hard to explain”.

Besides Greeks, the Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians, Russians, Finns and French point to Chinese. On their part, when describing the incomprehensible the Chinese refer to a “product of heaven”.