Language quiz
Here’s a recording of part of a radio interview. Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in?
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
October 18th, 2008 in
Language, Quiz questions
Perhaps greek?
no, it’s definitely Romance, I recognized some of the words as Spanish, but the inflection pattern sounded closer to Italian. It’s obviously not the primary dialect of either though.
Finnish.
It sounds just like Finnish
I heard the word ‘Suomessa’ which means ‘in Finland’.
I’m pretty sure it’s standard Finnish.
Many words have Romance sound as realist, tradición, also slavic word moя, and grammatical termination cases as om, typical slavic. I also agree with lau, and the word suomessa.
I’ll guess in some dialect or regionalism spoken in Finnish-Russian border area includind Saamis.
To me, it’s pretty obviously Finnish: the vowels, syllable structure, that style of enunciation and the rhythm are all unmistakable (though Estonian is very close). I also heard “päivä” (in “päiväston”?), which I know from the phrase “hyvä päivä” means “day”.
Sounds like Finnish, but it has a lot of different sibilants… so not standard Finnish I guess.
I initially thought it was Finnish / Estonian because of the vowel structure, but then I (thought I) understood distinct Arabic-esque words with Italian hints. So, I’m going to go against the prevailing thought and guess that it’s Maltese.
Can anyone tell me what the heck this is? When trying to note down words from Simon’s quiz recordings and Googling them, I often reach pages from this website. It is most likely not a real (artificial or natural) language, but there’s no explanation on the website.
Halabund:
It’s meaningless text generated by a CGI script running on the website. At least some of the images (those of the ‘text’) are from the Voynich manuscript. Others are from alchemical texts here: http://levity.com/alchemy/images/
Add any word to the end of the URL below and you’ll get an article about it.
http://mv.lycaeum.org/anagrams/PARALINGUA.cgi?article=
Halabund: PS. The Voynich texts are randomly assembled from letters from the manuscript (again put together by the website’s CGI script).
As for the mystery language, I’m going to guess Karelian.
without reading any of the other comments, im going with estonian
Finnish! Hyva Paaiva?
Sounds really like Finnish – I thought I heard ‘uksi’ in there which is the number one. And the -essa noun ending. But that said it doesn’t sound exactly like the Finnish I heard in Helsinki. Is that a reference to the Kalevala at the start? If so this could be a discussion in Karelian.
I live in Sweden and I am pretty sure that it is Finnish. I heard the word Suomi that means Finnland, kirja = book and hyvää = good. If it isn’t Finnish it could be meänlieki which is spoken on the border between Sweden and Finnland.
Finnish
Arabic
I get it from her way of pronouncing H.
farrioth: And each article has links to others … I wonder how much of it is indexed by Google. This search returns 3’500’000 hits (at least that’s what Google says). :-)
Sounds a lot like Finnish but not enough like Finnish to actually be Finnish. I’m going to plump for Saami seeing as Mienkieli, Estonian and Karelian are taken and because it’s a wild guess.
The language is Finnish and comes from YLE Radio 1.