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Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance

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

#51

Post by bonzini »

michalskop wrote: post #21

Correction 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)

It'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

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

#53

Post by peterburkimsher »

There 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 ;-)

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

#54

Post by ygra »

timthorn wrote: post #43
daniyel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 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.

Though æ is used in English, too.

And ë or ö, archaically ;)

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

#56

Post by slazaro »

hirsin wrote: post #37
grondilu wrote: post #24

Only 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.

SwiftKey (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.

AFAIK 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.

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

#57

Post by atomwaffel »

wibr wrote: post #55

ß for German!

Yes, 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.

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

#58

Post by TorKlingberg »

grondilu wrote: post #24

Only 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.

For Firefox there is the Dictionary Switcher extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dictionary-sw...

As hirsin said, SwiftKey does this really well on Android. It's probably my main irritation on iOS: having to switch keyboard all the time when I could just type English on the Swedish keyboard.

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

#59

Post by hawflakes »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #53

There 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 ;-)

It's not true that only Taiwanese uses it. It means "mutual" or "each other" and is used quite a bit.

互相 mutual 互聯網 internet

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