15 thoughts on “Language quiz

  1. This is Raman, a threatened and rare dialect spoken by about 40 people in North Africa. It began life as a pidgin between the Vulgar Latin of Roman troops and the locally spoken variety of Arabic, but over time leveled as an extremely Latinized Arab dialect; i.e., about two-thirds of its vocabulary is Latin-derived but its grammar is simplified Arabic.

  2. It sounds CV-syllabic and I hear something like [wa] a couple of times. It doesn’t quite sound like the Tokyo standard, so maybe it’s another dialect of Japanese or Ryukyuan?

    A crude transcription yields:

    amamiro azadinti wa karu mafade wa katin

    which is consistent with Japanese phonology.

    I don’t know Japanese so I can’t make any sense or guesses out of that, perhaps someone else here can?

  3. Well … sounds like eastern ….. but it is definetely nor Arabic …… and I can’t track much similarities with Arabic except of one word … “Dunyaaye” which sounds like “Dunya” in Arabic which means “life”

    it has a sense of some perso-related languages … some where from central asia i would say !

  4. Never heard of ‘Raman’, but a blend of Romance and Arabic makes sense. So I would have gone for Maltese – if there were one “L” or another to be heard.
    Starting all over again I’d rather settle with an Iranian language (how about Tajik?).

  5. Does sound awfully like Japanese, appart from the guttural noises…it’s not somethig related to Japanese like Ainu or Okinawan is it?

  6. A little bit of listening and googleing turned up this. (It is clearly the first paragraph.)

    So it is Kurdish.

  7. No clue which language it is. It doesn’t sound like Japanese to me, and nor does it sound like Indonesian. I guess that it’s a western language.

  8. Ah, God! I knew it! I should have posted earlier!

    Anyways, I can at least get cred for saying it’s Kurmanci, right?

    -Ben

  9. in response to TJ: doesn’t dunya mean “world” in arabic? I thought life was “hayati”

  10. also, in response to the first comment: Arabic wasn’t spoken in North Africa until well after the Romans fell. how would that synthesis be possible?

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