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Tangential observation: Google Translate detects your text as Frisian, but regardless of whether I select Frisian or Dutch, it gives an identical translation in
by umanwizard 6y ago
Tangential observation: Google Translate detects your text as Frisian, but regardless of whether I select Frisian or Dutch, it gives an identical translation into English. Which is it really? And are the two languages really so similar that Google should be able to understand them interchangeably?
- Freak_NL 6y agoIt is West-Frisian (Frysk), and the languages are close, but so are Dutch and German or West-Frisian and German (so not that close). I'm not getting the behaviour you describe though. It detects West-Frisian and does a passable translation, but if I force it to see Dutch as the source it makes no sense of it at all. It is also failing quite hilariously on „in smak minsken”, which means “quite a bunch of people”, but gets translated as “a taste people”. Google sees „smak” as a misspelling of „smaak” (taste), but it means “a bunch” or “many”.
- umanwizard 6y agoYou are right: I tried again and I can't reproduce the behavior. Perhaps I got confused and selected Frisian twice, the first time I tried. (Google's UI lists it as simply "Frisian" for me, not West-Frisian).
- Freak_NL 6y agoI think most people call it Frisian. West-Frisian is used formally because other (mostly historic) variants exist. What is now the province of Frisia is only a modest part of what was once a larger kingdom stretching into the North-East of modern Germany (where Ost Friesland is the name of a region in Niedersachsen still). Confusingly, in the Netherlands there is a West-Friesland as well to the West of the province, but people don't speak or understand (West-)Frisian there.