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Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

theweek.com

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Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#11

Post by niccaluim »

…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.

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#13

Post by cturner »

yongjik wrote: post #8
Nadya wrote: post #5

Additional 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 Ja…

Twist: 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.

Taiwan hasn't followed the simplification. Could you be looking at dual printed classical/simplified Chinese?

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#14

Post by thaumasiotes »

yongjik wrote: post #8
Nadya wrote: post #5

Additional 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 Ja…

Twist: 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.

来 and 学, from the original example, are both simplified characters (the traditionals being 來 and 學). I was a little bemused to see them in an example of Japanese text, but it turns out they are the common Japanese characters as well. Japanese has its own set of simplifications ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai ), often overlapping with the Maoist simplifications.

In a different pattern, mainland China simplified 龍 to 龙 while Japan simplified it to 竜. Despite being a "simplified" form, 竜 is actually the oldest of those three characters.

>> For those who don't know Japanese, only following my rule, can you identify the Japanese characters in the sentence above?

I would technically meet that requirement, but knowledge of Chinese makes the question pretty easy regardless of knowing Japanese. ;)

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#15

Post by School-Cotton »

Nadya wrote: post #5

Additional 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 Ja…

Another 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.)

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#16

Post by Nadya »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #14
yongjik wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twist: 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.

来 and 学, from the original example, are both simplified characters (the traditionals being 來 and 學). I was a little bemused to see them in an example of Japanese text, but it turns out they are the common Japanese characters as well. Japanese has its own set of simplifications ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai ), often overlapping with the Maoist simplifications. In a different pattern, mainland China simplif…

>I would technically meet that requirement, but knowledge of Chinese makes the question pretty easy regardless of knowing Japanese. ;)

Found the loophole in my requirements! Haha :) Had a good laugh when you pointed that out, thank you. Showed a quirk in my reasoning.

You also did a wonderful job explaining the simplified/traditional characters and the overlap between them and I learned a bit of trivia!

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#18

Post by billforsternz »

superbatfish wrote: post #17

Crap, I upvoted this before I noticed which publication it's from. How do I downvote it?

On 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?

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#19

Post by dragonwriter »

billforsternz wrote: post #18
superbatfish wrote: post #17

Crap, I upvoted this before I noticed which publication it's from. How do I downvote it?

On 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?

"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.

Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

#20

Post by billforsternz »

dragonwriter wrote: post #19
billforsternz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On 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?

"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.

I 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.
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