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Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
- mdturnerphys 10y agoReminded me of this quiz: http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/34l/default.htm http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/34l/default.htm
- superbatfish 10y agoCrap, I upvoted this before I noticed which publication it's from. How do I downvote it?
- billforsternz 10y agoOn a meta level I find that just a little troubling. It sounds to me like "Crap, I agreed with this until I noticed it was an opinion from a tribe I don't identify with - so I can't agree with it". Maybe theweek.com is some uniquely evil thing I haven't heard about?
- dragonwriter 10y ago"Upvote" means something different than "agree"; one of the things it means is "I endorse people visiting this". I can imagine quite a few sources that I wouldn't want to direct traffic to even if they published something where I agree with the sentiment.
- billforsternz 10y agoI wasn't implying that upvote means agree - only that upvote and agree are positive rather than negative sentiments (because I was proposing a broad pattern match not an exact semantic match). But your explanation does make sense to me, that is a plausible stance, thanks.
- StavrosK 10y agoBut what's wrong with theweek?
- lagadu 10y agoThis is the first time I heard of the week, a quick glance around failed to raise any problems; what's wrong with them?
- Karunamon 10y agoThe idea of voting for a link for any reason other than its quality is completely anti ethical to a karmic voting system like the one used here.
- dragonwriter 10y agoYes, but "quality" is both vague and subjective, not only will different people evaluate aspects of quality differently, different people will legitimately have different views on what components "quality" of a link has. I don't think it's unreasonable to consider the source as a one factor in overall quality (if nothing else as a proxy for things the rater is unable to evaluate about the article in isolation.)
- Karunamon 10y agoBut why should things other than the article directly linked to matter? Why should it be acceptable to downvote an otherwise interesting and correct article just because of the source? That smacks of voting for ideological correctness over truth or interestingness, a problem that otherwise intelligent people should be able to look past. What makes this site meaningfully different from the front page of Reddit if people will crap on an article because it comes from a source that doesn't align with their politics?
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Why should it be acceptable to downvote an otherwise interesting and correct article just because of the source? "Correct" is often a probabilistic assessment, not something a potential up/downvoter can determine absolutely. The source is often an important input to that probabilistic assessment. > That smacks of voting for ideological correctness over truth or interestingness Different outlets of the same ideological bent (whether relatively neutral or not) can have wildly different editorial standards which produce wildly different reliability.
- to3m 10y agoThis is all very helpful, but how do you spot English?
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoPardon?
- daniyel 10y agoIf the text contains only plain, boring letters and you see the word "the" being used a few times... you're looking at a text in English.
- timthorn 10y agoThough æ is used in English, too.
- skykooler 10y agoQuite rarely, however. Especially in American english (British English still uses it for some spellings, like "encyclopædia").
- timthorn 10y agoYes, I have noted the American difference. Pedophile means something quite different!
- ygra 10y agoAnd ë or ö, archaically ;)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- eru 10y agoAnd ï.
- Nadya 10y agoAdditional bonus: Korean uses lots of basic angles, squares, and lines and many Hangul have "three parts" eg. 한국어의 It's a beautifully simple writing system. You can go quite a long comment chain in Japanese without seeing の. I always tell people "look for lots of simple characters that can be written with only 2 or 3 lines mixed in between a bunch of really complex characters". 来週は学校に行きません For those who don't know Japanese, only following my rule, can you identify the Japanese characters in the sentence above? Except with names, Japanese writing will have a bunch of Chinese characters with many "simple" Japanese characters sprinkled in between. To someone who doesn't read Japanese, both are "unintelligible" but I find people can identify the more complex Kanji from the more simple Kana quite easily and can point them out with pretty good accuracy, even if they can't read any of the kana. The above example without Japanese characters if you'd like to see if you guessed correctly: 来週学校行
- umanwizard 10y agoAnother quirk about the の thing is that some Chinese-speaking people, in Taiwan at least (not sure about the mainland) use の as a colloquial replacement for 的, presumably due to Japanese cultural influence. So it's not completely impossible to see の in a Chinese-language text. (They still pronounce it "de", only the writing is different.)
- yongjik 10y agoTwist: When you see a pair of complex-looking Chinese character strings, but if one of them looks somewhat "simpler", then chances are that it's Chinese and the other is Japanese. Because Mainland Chinese people use simplified characters.
- hiphipjorge 10y agoI try doing this a lot when listening to people on the street and think I'm pretty good at it... Of course, I never truly know unless I ask!
- schoen 10y agoWikipedia has a more elaborate and detailed guide to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition... but this article's approach is actually pretty handy and its tips are very practical.
- niccaluim 10y ago…both use accents on vowels, but only Scots uses grave (left-pointing) accents, like on à in Gàidhlig. Just a quick note of caution here: "Scots" and "Scots Gaelic" are two completely different languages, the former being a Germanic language closely related to English and spoken in the Lowlands, and the latter being a Celtic tongue largely confined to the Highlands, the Western Isles, and Nova Scotia. If you can read English you can probably make some vague sense of written Scots, but unless you have training there's no way you'd understand a word of Scottish Gaelic. This article is referring to Gaelic, not Scots.
- michalskop 10y agoCorrection to the article: There is no Ů in Czech (except for CAPS LOCKED words) - The longer "u" is written as "Ú/ú" as the first letter in a word, and "ů" in other positions (strange for sure, but because of historical reasons)
- rdancer 10y agoThe article is correct, though: if you see Ů, it's Czech.
- bonzini 10y agoIt's not just historical. "Ů" is phonologically a longer "u", but it is actually an alternation [1] of "o": for example see how nominative "dům" becomes "domu" in the genitive (likewise "stůl", "bůh", etc.). When a "u" becomes longer, instead, it becomes a "ú" as the first letter of the word, but otherwise it becomes "ou"; for example see how the feminine nominative of (some) nouns and adjectives is "a" and "á" respectively, while the accusative is "u" and "ou", or how the perfective companion of "kupovat" is "koupit". (Also, see how I sneaked in a "Ů" in the second sentence :)). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternation_%28linguistics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternation_%28linguistics%29
- grondilu 10y agoOnly tangentially related, but why can't spelling check software automatically figure out which language I'm typing in? I write mostly in English but sometimes I write in French or in a mix of both languages and I usually struggle with the spelling corrector which keeps bothering me.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoI suspect it's less a case of they can't and more a case of they don't. Automatic language detection can be done with reasonable accuracy.
- hirsin 10y agoSwiftKey (Android keyboard) does an amazing job of this. I routinely switch between French and English, and usually by the end of the first word in the other language my autocorrect and suggestions are both in the right language.
- slazaro 10y agoAFAIK it uses Markov chains, so I think it just lumps all dictionaries together, and as soon as you write a couple of words, the probabilities for the following words will be in the proper language. It doesn't even need specific rules per language, it's all automatic.
- patates 10y agoThat is my guess as well but, whatever it is, it works marvelously. Many times, I write a significant portion of my message just through suggestions.
- eru 10y agoThat's a funny game to play with your friends (if they also have personalized suggestions). Just see what you can write using only your suggestions.
- 10y ago
- LanceH 10y agoPersian will have three dots in a triangle above a single upward stroke or below the line. Arabic only has the three dot combo above the script on a multiple upward stroke grouping (sometimes a flat line between upstrokes).
- saadat 10y agoThe same is true for Urdu as well, so if you want to distinguish Urdu from Persian: look for a backward moving (i.e. towards the right) horizontal stroke at the end of a word. This stroke will always run under the preceding letters of the word, except that some dots of the preceding letters may be moved beneath the stroke in order to avoid collision.
- patrickburke 10y agoThis reminds me of this fine map, "List of writing systems" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/World_alphabets_%26_writing_systems.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/World_al...
- brendyn 10y agoSome of my Chinese friends use の instead of Chinese equivalent 的 just for fun. Personally I distinguish them by just going and learning the languages. It's easy to distinguish them by noticing Japanese has curvy characters mixed with blocky complicated Chinese ones, where is Chinese is 100% complicated blocky characters. Also I just want to put it out there randomly that if you want to learn a language but believe you can't, you are almost certainly wrong. If you are able to read this text, you have demonstrated possession of a wet sack of neurons capable of learning a second language. I've witnessed or read about all sorts of people learning a new language; old people, shy, autistic, even while dealing with brain cancer. It is a myth to think children can learn faster than adults. The only time this happens is when the adult is hindered by there own reluctances. Go get some beginner materials with audio, not just text, and dive in. Don't waste time torrenting 12312^23 TiB of learning materials. Glossika, Teach Yourself X, Xpod, Xclass101, whatever. Learn how to ask some trivial questions relevant to your life, write them down because you will forget, then go chat with a native speaker somehow. Read out your questions because you're nervous and forgot, and then fail to understand anything they say, but just pay attention and listen to the sounds of the language. Then go home and learn a bit more, but don't worry too much about memorising anything, just listen, and comprehend a little bit. Then meet up with a native speaker again with some more questions prepared. This time you might understand 0, 1, or a few words, still be nervous, but you'll be a little bit better than last time. Basically you just keep this up without giving up and you will pick up pace. For inspiration, look at blogs like Benny Lewis' and others. It may take 10000 hours to master, but it only takes hundreds of hours to find yourself understand and contributing to group conversations comfortably. If you can enjoy the process, you'll be able to study for N hours for any N as the clock keeps ticking regardless. Just set N=1000
- adrianN 10y agoFor some languages a couple hundred hours might be enough to participate meaningfully in a normal conversation. But if you're for example an English native speaker and want to learn Chinese, you'll have a really hard time understanding anything but very simple sentences. On the other hand if you know English and German well, it is very easy to learn for example Dutch, and a couple hundred hours will get you really far.
- beyondcompute 10y agoĦħ - Maltese
- sdfjkl 10y agoÐ/đ may also be Croatian, where it sounds like a "dj". Technically it could also be Serbian (which is pretty much the same spoken language, called Serbo-Croatian), but Serbian is usually written using the Cyryllic alphabet while Croats chose Roman letters.
- patates 10y agoNitpick: In Turkish, "ğ" is silent by itself but it makes the pronunciation of the vowel before itself longer and sometimes makes the pronunciation end at the back of the mouth, especially after "e". "Erdoğan" is indeed just "Erdooan" though.
- peterburkimsher 10y agoThere is a character only used in Taiwanese, not Chinese: 互 By that, I mean the Taiwanese language, which is not the same as Mandarin Chinese. Both languages are used in Taiwan, although Mandarin is the official language of the (outgoing) KMT government. Taiwan number 1 ;-)
- wibr 10y agoß for German!
- atomwaffel 10y agoYes, if you spot ß, that's a dead giveaway for German. You can't really rely on it alone for identification however because it's not that frequent (or rather, it's very inconsistent – German can run for paragraphs without a single ß only to make up for it with five of them in a single sentence). It's also not used at all in Swiss German. Another near-certain giveaway is that all nouns in German are capitalised. The only other language that does that and uses the Latin alphabet is Luxembourgish, and you're probably not looking at that.
- varjag 10y ago> You can sometimes tell Danish from Norwegian because Danish sometimes uses aa (as in Kierkegaard) instead of å. That goes both ways (e.g. Haakonsvern in Norway), so no you really can't tell it apart that way.
- sharpercoder 10y ago>Dutch, German, and Afrikaans: Of these three close relations to English, only German uses Ä/ä, Ö/ö, and Ü/ü. Incorrect: Dutch uses the trema on the i, e, o, u, a as well. Examples: * reünie * knieën * ruïne * Aäron * zoöloog
- pge 10y agoAnd anal English speakers (such as the copy editors of the New Yorker) also use the diaresis (the double dot over a vowel). In English, it is used over the second of two vowels in a row which are voiced separately, such as naive (should have the double dot over the i) or cooperate (double dot over the second o). The distinction is between a word like coop (meaning a house for chickens) in which the two vowels make one sound and a word like cooperation, in which the two o's are separate sounds.
- Grue3 10y agoNothing on Filipino/Indonesian languages? Those always confuse me, since the users also heavily mix them with English, so you might see a comment mostly in English but also have a bunch of native words or phrases mixed in.
- vansteen 10y agoFrench: Often used: à è é Used: â ä ê ë î ï ô û ù œ ç Very very rare: æ ü ÿ
- vansteen 10y agoI like Hacker News for that. The topic of this article is interesting. Thanks for bringing that up. However, when you read the comments here, you realise the article is quite wrong :)
- gazrogers 10y ago> Welsh is actually quite different from the other two. It uses lots of ll and ff and it uses w as a vowel (e.g., cwm). Welsh also uses a circumflex accent to extend any of the vowels, and since both 'w' and 'y' are vowels in Welsh (leading to many jokes by English speakers about words with no vowels) they can have the circumflex accent too. I've had problems in the past finding the alt-codes to generate w or y with a circumflex accent - so those may be unique to Welsh. From http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/bylanguage/welsh.html http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/bylanguage/welsh.html : > Because of the writing system, Welsh places accents on the letters w (phonetic /u/) and y (phonetic /ɨ/ or /i/), which is very unique in languages of the world. These symbols require Unicode support apart from that of other Western European languages.