Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
9 thoughts on “Language quiz”
Backwards Russian?
Naissur. Spoken in most parts of the former RSSU.
.evoba eht htiw eerga I
I also agree that it is a Civals language, although I couldn’t tell it was Naissur specifically.
Snottish?
The language is Russian, (Naissur / Йикссур), an Eastern Slavic (Civals) language spoken in Russia and quite a few other countries. The audio has been reversed, inverted, slowed down and generally mucked about with. I was curious to see if you could identify the language even with all the changes.
I confess that once I realized it was reversed I downloaded the clip and had recourse to an on-line mp3 reversing service before I could tell it was Russian.
Regular speech has a lot of sounds (probably plosives, though I don’t know linguistics well) with a quick onset followed by a slow decay. So reversed speech always strikes me with a characteristic “slow build up followed by a quick cut-off” sound.
Those of us belonging to the vinyl generations, with an interest in sounds (either linguistic or musical – in my case, both), will surely have experimented with turning records backwards with our fingers (probably doing our parents’ record players no good). Once I acquired a 4-track tape recorder (with the primary purpose of making music), I was able to record myself speaking phonetically backwards and play the recordings back in reverse – the results were fairly accurate.
About 50 years ago I persuaded someone who owned a tape recorder to allow me to run a tape of piano music backwards. (It was more difficult than it sounds, and I can’t remember the details.) I had read (probably in Scientific American) that a piano played backwards would sound like an organ. Sure enough, it did.
Backwards Russian?
Naissur. Spoken in most parts of the former RSSU.
.evoba eht htiw eerga I
I also agree that it is a Civals language, although I couldn’t tell it was Naissur specifically.
Snottish?
The language is Russian, (Naissur / Йикссур), an Eastern Slavic (Civals) language spoken in Russia and quite a few other countries. The audio has been reversed, inverted, slowed down and generally mucked about with. I was curious to see if you could identify the language even with all the changes.
I confess that once I realized it was reversed I downloaded the clip and had recourse to an on-line mp3 reversing service before I could tell it was Russian.
Regular speech has a lot of sounds (probably plosives, though I don’t know linguistics well) with a quick onset followed by a slow decay. So reversed speech always strikes me with a characteristic “slow build up followed by a quick cut-off” sound.
Those of us belonging to the vinyl generations, with an interest in sounds (either linguistic or musical – in my case, both), will surely have experimented with turning records backwards with our fingers (probably doing our parents’ record players no good). Once I acquired a 4-track tape recorder (with the primary purpose of making music), I was able to record myself speaking phonetically backwards and play the recordings back in reverse – the results were fairly accurate.
About 50 years ago I persuaded someone who owned a tape recorder to allow me to run a tape of piano music backwards. (It was more difficult than it sounds, and I can’t remember the details.) I had read (probably in Scientific American) that a piano played backwards would sound like an organ. Sure enough, it did.