It’s almost as if a linguist went back in time and gave King Seong ideas.
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You mean there’s a system for this? I just figured it out by seeing a bunch of writing in each language.
The Asian languages are curious to me, because I can’t read any of them at all, but they are so EASY to tell apart!
Georgian has its own unique very cursive script which is immediately recognisable (and which I believe predates Cyrillic). I can’t write it on my phone, but here’s a link. The two which got me were Mongolian and Kurdish. Mongolian I knew was written in Cyrillic but Kurdish I would have thought would use an Arabic script. Did they change over to a Latin script likeTurkish?
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Ř, ř: This is the classic distinctive Czech letter. It stands for a sound so difficult to learn, even Czech kids take years to get it right
If you only speak English, you’ll have a hard time with this one. Many other languages, notably French, do learn to roll their Rs. This video shows it’s not too difficult. Well, maybe if you’re not from Alabama.
The rest of the video series is pretty good.
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Sorry, didn’t realize the quiz was compulsory. I just read the article.
And not once in that did you use the sound that “ł” actually stands for in Polish.
Is it like the LL sound in Welsh? I think that’s what it is in Navajo. I don’t know any Polish speakers personally.
I wasn’t criticizing you. Rather, I was explaining how the quiz used the word Persian instead of Farsi…even when you typed in Farsi, it changed to Persian.
Anyway, @jerwin cited some examples. Me, I just assigned (guessed) Arabic to the first script and correctly guessed Farsi for the second. (I did that with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, too.)
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No worries. I just put in the bit about the quiz being compulsory as a set up for other’s jokes.
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Okay, this has to stop. Is this a quirk of Adobe products or something? Arabic is written right to left with connecting letters. I see this all the time lately, including in major Hollywood productions with big budgets, where the word is right, but backwards and written in disjoint lettering. I really want to know if Adobe has issues rendering RTL scripts.
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What in the world where the 33% I didn’t get?
One or two of them I could even read and understand, but was unable to guess. Like Anglo-Saxon or something. Flemish?
And what is the language that was not Swahili?
Ha! Funny. I’m a dumbass, it says it right here.
So I misspelled Czech, Scots and Kiswahili.
Welsh (I had just recognized Irish, so I tried Gaelic, but somehow didn’t think of Welsh)
A quick way to distinguish Welsh and Gaelic (Scots or Irish) is that Welsh has ‘w’ and ‘y’… sometimes, ‘w’ and/or ‘y’ are the only vowels in Welsh words. Gaelic has neither ‘w’ nor ‘y’ at all.
Standard Irish tends to have words that start with odd consonant combinations like “bhfuil”, “gconai” and “mbuachaill”. Gaelic has the mentioned grave accents and a whole lot more dashes and hyphens… think things like “A’ bheil”, “an t-sluaigh” and “na h-eileanan”.
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Easy way I do it - look for the Hamza. I look for them on top of the long character that look like a lower case “L” - kind of like the Hamza is dotting the lower case “L”.
If I don’t see any, I can assume it is Farsi.
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Why does the article say it can identify any language then only go on to discuss like a dozen languages. Farsi v. Arabic is a big one - it gives us Icelandic, but not Hindi?
Disappointing, isn’t it?
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Great cartoon - will help out like 90% of the time - the other 10% it is going to be Kannada, or Punjabi, or Bangla, or Laotian, etc.
I took this to mean there was some fundamental lesson about the parts of speech, definite and indefinite articles. Scratched my head a good minute before I caught on.
Thanks for keeping me honest. I fixed my typo. 
I wasn’t very good at that quiz. Better brush up.
Well, I don’t know about “instead”. A creole is a language. But so is a dialect. Or it might depend on the Haitian military budget:
אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט
a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot
(If you speak Yiddish, German or a closely related language, you’ll understand that. If you don’t: “shprakh” means “language”, “mit” means “with” and “un” means “and”).
As far as I can tell, linguists are pretty happy to call almost everything a language. I grew up bilingual without knowing it - the local dialects of German as well as standard German.
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