Name the language
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
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Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Language, Quiz questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
December 20th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
At first, I thought it was Latvian, but after hearing “Sakartvelo” several times, I say Georgian.
December 20th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Georgian (Kartuli ena). And I didn’t even hear “Sakartvelo”!
It’s the dark /l/ sounds, the consonant clusters (e.g. cx/tskh), the seven vowel system, and the numerous loans fro Russian and Latinate European sources that give it away.
December 20th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Some Creole of French?
December 20th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
…and I forgot to mention the combination of aspirated and ejective stops. Now, listening again, I hear they guy talking about Sakartvelo (Georgia)…
December 20th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
I immediately though Georgian, but I thought I recognized the word “actor”. I’ll give it a listen again though, but I think it’s Georgian.
December 20th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Well, if all say it’s georgian, who am I to deny this….
December 21st, 2009 at 12:58 am
To be honest I’ve got no idea. I know it’s not Turkish, but there were certain parts of it that reminded me of Turkish. And I have also read about the many consonants in Georgian, and this seemed like quite a dense language. So I’ll go with the majority.
December 21st, 2009 at 8:38 am
Could it be Haitian French? I found most of it unintelligible, but occasional phrases sounded a bit like French. Interesting that several people suggest Georgian — I’d have expected more obvious consonant clusters if it were Georgian.
December 21st, 2009 at 9:13 am
I also think it’s some kind of French-based creole.
December 21st, 2009 at 2:17 pm
It is Georgian, although I don’t think I heard any Russian-specific loan words. Plenty of Western loan words of course and perhaps some of them originally transmitted via Russian. And can someone elaborate on the ‘dark /l/’ that Chris Miller mentions? Also, I was under the impression that Georgian had five vowels, not seven.
December 21st, 2009 at 4:46 pm
By ‘dark /l/’, I meant (using an informal term) a velarised [ɫ] as opposed to one without the velar coarticulation.
And mentioning a ’7 vowel’ system was a slip: I meant a five vowel system and didn’t notice the error even after rereading what I typed several times! I’m glad you pointed that out. Georgian has a simple five vowel system: a, e, i, o, u.
Several loan words are from general European latinate vocabulary and could equally be from Russian or a western European language. One, “situacia”, spoken by the man a bit after halfway in, followed by something unclear then “Sakartvelo(s)”, is most likely from Russian ситуация .
December 21st, 2009 at 5:41 pm
The language is Georgian (ქართული) which is spoken mainly in Georgia.
The recording comes from Radio Free Europe.
December 21st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Thanks for the clarification, I didn’t mean to sound nitpicky.
December 21st, 2009 at 7:19 pm
To Greg-
Don’t worry, didn’t take it that way.
December 21st, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Now isn’t that funny! I just realised that თ (the letter) in ქართული (Kartuli) looks very close to in many of the Pallava-derived scripts of southeast Asian, and for all intents and purposes identical to the Burmese letter. It’s amusing how purely by chance, these kinds of resemblances crop up. (Kind of similar to the way words with the same meaning and (nearly identical) pronunciation crop up by chance in different languages, like the English and Persian ‘bad’.
December 21st, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Somehow I managed to erase part of what I just typed. The first sentence should read “… close to in many of the…”.
December 22nd, 2009 at 3:02 am
Ungh! I know the problem! I’ve been using angled brackets to enclose symbols for letters, because that’s the more or less standard formalism in linguistics. They disappear each time because the blog software interprets them as brackets enclosing HTML code.
I intended to say “I just realised that თ (the letter T) in ქართული (Kartuli) looks very close to T in many of thePallava-derived scripts of southeast Asia, and for all intents and purposes identical to the Burmese letter T.”
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
The თ also bears a striking (and equally coincidental) resemblance to the Hiragana の (no), a frequently occuring character that’s essentially Japanese for ‘of’.
December 26th, 2009 at 12:50 am
I’m not sure what it is… but I know Romanian, and it’s not that for all of you who thought so.
December 26th, 2009 at 12:52 am
haa… wrong post sorry guys!
January 4th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
–ruseti
it’s in georgian
rus+eti = rusia (rus + land)
January 13th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
The second speaker does mention Sakartvelo, but he pronounces it “sa-kart-vello-oh.” Wikipedia has a soundfile made by a guy from Tbilisi where it is “Sa-kart-vay-loh.”