Name the language
Here is a short text in a mystery language sent in by Shair Ahmed. Do you know or can you guess which language it is?
Tíobáhai hi báaiso kohoaihíaisóogabagaí. Tí ‘ísi báaiso ‘ogabagai, gíiai ‘ogihíaihiaba. Tíobáhai hi ‘ísi báaiso ‘oaboihaí. ‘Ahoakohoaihio ‘ísi kaopápihaí.
Clue: the name of this language looks a bit fishy.
October 20th, 2007 in
Language, Quiz questions
I knew I saw this somewhere, it was a part of Vreleksá’s ‘What Language Is This’ thread.
It’s Piraha.
I should have told you all not to post here.
This language is clearly Arabic, as the person who submitted it has an Arabic name.
My guess is the “language” that comes up when you have your character encodings set up incorrectly and the browser doesn’t recognize the real language. Of course, that’s just what it looks like to me ;)
I can tell you one thing: this is definitely not Arabic.
It seem to me a polynesian language: it looks agglutinant, among other details…
My first thought was Chinook.
d.m.f.
It is Pirahã (piranha ;D), spoken in Brazil. The language has one of the smallest phoneme inventories in the world.
Funny that noone seems to believe Tolkien_Freak, but doesn’t mention another language the name of which reminds of the name of a fish (as Piraha, spoken in Central Brazil, and Piranha does).
And the first word “tíobahái” simply means “child”. Believe or not.
It is indeed Pirahã, a language spoken by about 150 people along the Maici river, a tributary of the Amazon in Brazil.
to tell the truth, the text with all these accent marks on vowels, looks like Irish for the first instance!!
Simon
I notice you haven’t got this particular language on the main Omniglot page – will you be adding it?
Stuart – I do plan to add a page about Pirahã to Omniglot soon.
I also thought it looked a bit like Irish. Pirahã has the least number of phonemes if [k] and the tones aren’t counted. Otherwise it is Rotokas, if long vowels aren’t counted. See Wikipedia for more info. (Just a random note)
There’s now a page about Pirahã on Omniglot.