Omniglot - the blog

Language quiz

Simon on 18 Mar 2007

Language and Quiz questions | Comments (11)

11 Responses to “Language quiz”

1. Colm on 18 Mar 2007 at 5:20 pm #

   Simon! Simon! I know, I know! Pick me! lol *grins*

   hehe This one was SO EASY for me but I won’t spoil it for the other people by telling. That would be mean.

2. Ben L. on 18 Mar 2007 at 6:07 pm #

   Sounds Celtic- Thinking about what the speakers might sound like in their presumed second languages, I guess Welsh, Irish, and Breton respectively.

3. Tadhg on 18 Mar 2007 at 6:37 pm #

   I’m not proud - it’s 1. Manx, 2. Scottish Gaelic, and 3. Irish.

4. Per on 18 Mar 2007 at 7:32 pm #

   I would have guessed Afrikaans, Flemish and Dutch proper. Having listened to Manx radio though, I am convinced that I was wrong. Anyone else who thinks that Dutch and Celtic sound the same?

5. Colm on 18 Mar 2007 at 8:18 pm #

   tut tut tut Tadhg hehe :D He is of course right.

   Per - Well there was a sort of Dutch resemblence in some of the sounds in the first couple of seconds for the first recording which was Manx. But listening to it as a whole a few times that feeling goes.

   Ben, why second language? I would imagine that these people speak these languages as their first. Why not? :)

6. Ben L. on 18 Mar 2007 at 8:35 pm #

   Indeed, they very well could and I would be totally ignorant to it. The second languages I was referring to, though, were the majority national languages in Britain, Ireland, and France. My method was to transpose the speakers’ voices over into those tongues, apparently unsuccessfully. I was using “second” not in the sense of “non-native”, simply in the sense of “other”.

7. Colm on 19 Mar 2007 at 10:28 am #

   Got you. (I understand).

8. John on 19 Mar 2007 at 9:34 pm #

   Does anyone still speak Manx?

9. Simon on 20 Mar 2007 at 8:52 am #

   John - about 650 people speak Manx, and another thousand or so have some knowledge of the language. Some families are bringing up their children with Manx as their first language, and there’s a number of nursery schools and one primary school that teach everything through the medium of Manx.

10. Tom on 24 Mar 2007 at 5:51 pm #

    So, what were the correct answers?

11. Simon on 27 Mar 2007 at 9:20 am #

    Tadhg got the answers right: 1. Manx, 2. Scottish Gaelic and 3. Irish.