Omniglot - the blog

Language quiz

Simon on 09 Dec 2007

Language and Quiz questions | Comments (22)

22 Responses to “Language quiz”

1. ٍAbdul-Rahman on 09 Dec 2007 at 7:52 pm #

   Second is Arabic.
   Third is probably some Indian language. (Tamil?)
   Fourth is Chinese.
   Fifth is Persian.

2. AR on 09 Dec 2007 at 8:12 pm #

   Albanian
   Arabic
   Bangla (bengali)
   Chinese
   Farsi (persian)
   French
   Portuguese
   Turkish

3. Mike on 09 Dec 2007 at 9:38 pm #

   I was going to say the same as AR, only with Urdu instead of Farsi.

4. Joanne on 09 Dec 2007 at 11:33 pm #

   Interesting!

   Just today I was looking at a similar list of languages at an American hospital, which provides translators for patients who do not speak English well. The list included Tagalog, Khmer, Cape Verdean Creole - languages I don’t see written often.

5. renato figueiredo on 09 Dec 2007 at 11:52 pm #

   1- Albanese
   2-Arabic
   3- Hindi
   4-Chinese
   5-Persian
   6-French
   7- Portuguese (Portugal) -in Brazil we don’t use the word quadrícula
   8-Turkish

6. Alessandro Delgado on 10 Dec 2007 at 12:16 am #

   1 - Don’t know
   2 - Arabic
   3 - Bengali
   4 - Chinese
   5 - Don’t know
   6 - French
   7 - Portuguese Portuguese
   8 - Turkish

7. BG on 10 Dec 2007 at 6:26 am #

   (Without looking)
   1. Don’t know
   2. Arabic or language written with it
   3. Hindi or other Indian language
   4. Chinese
   5. Arabic or language written with it
   6. French
   7. Portuguese
   8. Turkish

8. Kerstin on 10 Dec 2007 at 6:53 am #

   1. Albanian
   2. Arabic?
   3. Not sure… Hindi?
   4. Chinese?
   5. Arabic?
   6. Français
   7. Português
   8. Turkish

9. TJ on 10 Dec 2007 at 9:15 am #

   1. Albanian
   2. Arabic
   3. Bengali
   4. Chinese (traditional)
   5. Farsi
   6. French
   7. Portuguese
   8. Turkish

10. prase on 10 Dec 2007 at 4:18 pm #

    Albanian
    Arabic
    Hindu
    Chinese
    Urdu
    French
    Portuguese
    Turkish

11. Simon on 10 Dec 2007 at 5:35 pm #

    AR got them all right - well done!

    1. Albanian
    2. Arabic
    3. Bengali
    4. Chinese (simplified characters)
    5. Farsi/Persian
    6. French
    7. Portuguese
    8. Turkish

    According to the council website, “The main community languages used in Brighton & Hove are Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Farsi, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.”

    I’m surprised that Polish isn’t included in the list. Maybe the council hasn’t up-dated that page for a while.

12. Joe on 10 Dec 2007 at 9:54 pm #

    On a side note, I just read an article on BBC World about how it’s being recommended that councils in the UK stop translating so much and instead start appropriating more of that money into programs to help immigrants learn English. This was largely aimed at councils’ annual reports, which nobody really reads anyway.

    Apparently, a lot of times translations are done for linguistic communities which aren’t even present in the population.

13. Chibi on 10 Dec 2007 at 9:55 pm #

    I’m curious to know what it means, and why the Portuguese is twice as long as the French, even though their say the same thing.

14. Chibi on 10 Dec 2007 at 9:56 pm #

    *they say the same thing.

15. BG on 11 Dec 2007 at 6:28 am #

    I’m surprised there isn’t a Spanish translation. Of course, in here in California that is the primary language things are translated into.

16. Simon on 11 Dec 2007 at 9:33 am #

    Chibi - the text means “Translation? Tick this box and take to any council office” - the original has the language names (in English) with boxes next to them.

    I’m not sure why the Portuguese is a longer than the French.

17. James on 11 Dec 2007 at 4:32 pm #

    Simon, are you sure that’s simplified Chinese script? It looks more like traditional to me… That’s based on a knowledge of Japanese rather than Chinese though…

18. TJ on 11 Dec 2007 at 5:00 pm #

    I think the reason for this length is that the portuguese sentence is more “detailed”

    I think for comparison it would be like this:

    french: translation? put check mark and post to council
    portuguese: translation? put A check mark IN square and deliver the report to the council.

19. Αλέξανδρος on 18 Dec 2007 at 2:09 am #

    James: Like you, I only know a bit of Japanese and no Chinese, but it’s easy to tell it’s simplified Chinese from the “speech” radical of the fourth and fifth character - it’s really distinctive. For example, 请 would be 請 in traditional script.

20. BG on 18 Dec 2007 at 6:32 am #

    The first few characters are pretty complex for simplified characters, but Αλέξανδρος’ explanation settles the matter. (I was unsure how to use the possessive with Greek writing. I was tempted to write Αλέξανδρου, the genitive in Ancient Greek.

21. Αλέξανδρος on 18 Dec 2007 at 10:54 pm #

    Hey, you’re absolutely correct! In fact, “Αλέξανδρου” is *modern* Greek. In older forms of the language, when the final syllable is long, the accent can’t be on the third syllable from the end and moves to the next possible place: “Αλεξάνδρου”.

    On the other hand, this conversation is in English, and writing the possesive as _Αλέξανδρος’_, or even more, _Αλέξανδρου_, seems weird to me. _Alexandros’_ looks much better.

    Using the native spelling of names using non-Latin writing is appropriate here, but as a courtesy I should have also signed in transliteration.

    Alexandros

22. BG on 19 Dec 2007 at 3:54 am #

    I am not very good with accents. We only use them in Ancient Greek class (a class that I take during lunch only a few times a week purely for fun) to contrast words, e.g. τις vs. τίς (a certain vs. who). I didn’t know Greek still had noun cases. I thought the same thing had happened as in the offspring of Latin (only pronoun cases left). I was definitely mistaken!