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This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

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Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#171

Post by michaelgrafl »

JPKab wrote: post #41
selmnoo wrote: post #2

This is the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGDN9-oFJE - be sure to have subtitles on (unless you understand Hindi). One interesting observation about the ad: the search results that the girl deems to be good and informative are almost all Wikipedia hits. It's actually pretty similar to my situation: Google is basically a better Wikipedia searching tool than what Wikipedia provides.

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political. Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively) Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always jus…

I grew up in Austria spending my summers in Croatia. My Croatian certainly isn't perfect, but I'm fluent and my Austrian friends certainly never get the feeling I'm unable to express myself when I'm talking to Croatian friends of mine.

I always start shaking my head when either Croats or Serbs tell me that they speak different languages, because frankly, I can't even tell them apart. Sometimes they find my notion of their languages' sameness offensive, which in turn I find offensively childish.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#172

Post by phillc73 »

dsrguru wrote: post #65
JPKab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political. Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively) Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always jus…

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually in…

I'm not convinced your Polish-Russian-Ukrainian example is correct.

My wife is from the west of Ukraine, and her home language is Ukrainian. However, she is totally fluent in Russian, as to be expected from someone growing up during the Soviet era.

Both Ukrainian and Russian are written using the Cyrillic alphabet, whereas Polish uses Roman letters.

She finds Polish fairly easy to understand, from an aural point of view, but does have difficulty reading it unless she mentally sounds out words phonetically.

My understanding is that Polish and Ukrainian languages are closer to each other, than Polish and Russian, or Ukrainian and Russian. It just so happens that almost all Ukrainians can easily slip between Ukrainian and Russian, with many Russian words now found in every day Ukrainian speech, due to political events of the last one hundred years.

Today, Ukraine is almost evenly split between ethnic Ukrainians in the west and ethnic Russians in the east. Kiev is the standout melting pot. This ethnic split is one reason why Ukrainian politics find themselves so often in a mess.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#173

Post by srd »

mcv wrote: post #153
dsrguru wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with the Arabic and Chinese language families, different varieties of Romance languages are similar enough in syntax and vocabulary that speakers can kind of make themselves understood to each other if they speak slowly and choose their words carefully. Same with lots of closely related languages, e.g. German and Dutch. But they're not nearly mutually intelligible to the degree that American English and most varie…

I'm Dutch, and people from the east of Netherland don't understand why I don't understand German, claiming the languages are so similar. But I have real trouble understanding German. Maybe when it's someone from the north-west of Germany who speaks very slowly and clearly. People from the east of Netherland have much less trouble, somehow. (I'm utterly unable to understand people from the Dutch province of Zeeland wh…

When you have trouble understanding germans, are they speaking Hochdeutsch or Platt? I'm curious if Platt is more closely related to Dutch than Hochdeutsch or not.

As a german, I always have problems understanding other germans when they speak english, so there's always that ;).

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#174

Post by zbrox »

nl wrote: post #97
JPKab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political. Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively) Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always jus…

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political Try Serbo-Croatian[1]. But OTOH, most Slavic languages are fairly similar. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian

I would disagree as well. Most Slavic languages are much less closely related than Roman languages for example. I'm a native Bulgarian speaker and while I can catch some words when travelling in Serbia it's not that straightforward to understand others or to explain myself. I can understand people better in Croatia actually, which is kinda weird cause we don't share a common border. If I go to Poland, the gap becomes even wider. But for both the gap is significant. Grammar is different (e.g. inflections vs no inflections), pronunciation is different, hell even the alphabets are different.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#175

Post by r0h1n »

psbp wrote: post #86
r0h1n wrote: post #64

Colour me cynical, but when a corporation is under fire from consumers, regulators and activists, a soppy and heartstring-tugging ad is exactly what the doctors order . It is literally Google saying, "Oh look, cute puppies!" when faced with a global barrage of criticism about its disdain for user privacy or its own past promises.

Um, large consumer companies release ads all the time, and google is always under fire by consumers, regulators and activists.

a. Google isn't just another "large consumer company"

b. Google being "always under fire" by consumers, regulators and activists is no reason to start letting it off the hook. In fact, it should be the converse.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#176

Post by eitally »

bhups wrote: post #128
notatoad wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the subtitles might have been a bit more necessary if all the on-screen text wasn't in english. That seemed like a strange choice for an ad produced by Google India.

English is widely used throughout India, as it's the "national link language" according to the constitution. Most advertisements, street signs and stores contain lots of English.

I've never been to any other country where mastery of a national language was as poor as English in India. This goes for both written and spoken language.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#177

Post by denzil_correa »

kranner wrote: post #126
denzil_correa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just a bit unlikely that Ali would be able to read 'saunf' in Devanagari, isn't it? Why?

Because Devanagari isn't taught at the school level in Pakistan, I'd guess.

But the person searching it was in India, wasn't he?

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#178

Post by pitchups »

The most interesting aspect of this video - other than the clearly emotional storyline - was how closely it reflects the way most of us use the web, smartphones, and yes - Google - to manage our day-to-day lives. A search for a landmark, a shop, to answer a quick question, to check the weather, to book a flight. Even more remarkable how almost none of this was possible a mere 10 years ago - at least not from the palm of our hand.

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#179

Post by kranner »

denzil_correa wrote: post #177
kranner wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Devanagari isn't taught at the school level in Pakistan, I'd guess.

But the person searching it was in India, wasn't he?

Yes, asadlionpk pointed out the same thing, and I agree that it makes sense in that context (that Ali could not assume fennel is 'saunf' in India as well).

Re: This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

#180

Post by carlesfe »

selmnoo wrote: post #2

This is the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHGDN9-oFJE - be sure to have subtitles on (unless you understand Hindi). One interesting observation about the ad: the search results that the girl deems to be good and informative are almost all Wikipedia hits. It's actually pretty similar to my situation: Google is basically a better Wikipedia searching tool than what Wikipedia provides.

Also, unless I noticed wrong, there are no ads on the search results.
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