Guess What Language I’m Speaking II.

December 11, 2023 by 20 Comments

Remember this post from April? Fun, right? Well, this video is twice as long and at least as much fun. I was surprised at some of the bad guesses and very impressed with Matthew, the scruffy music expert. I got a couple of them right off the bat but on the whole wouldn’t have done as well as he did. Thanks again, Eric!

(There will doubtless be spoilers in the comments, so you might want to watch the video first.)

Comments

  1. drasvi says
    December 11, 2023 at 7:01 pm

    Remembered the April post very recently. I sometimes complained at owners deleting videos of a singer Asmahan from youtube. I find the mixture of european and eastern in her songs quite fascinating (and crazy sometimes) and same applies to movies themselves (I find the video about nights in Vienna surrealistic). So in the previous video a girl sings a song whose genre is defined by Arabic WP as “maqam nahawand in the rhythm of tango”.

  2. Kevin says
    December 11, 2023 at 7:22 pm

    Since spoilers are warned about:

    I felt pretty good. Got 3 exactly (Lao, Burmese and Somali, where there are just very recognizable words). Got 1 almost exactly (the Romanian guy I thought was Moldovan just based on his accent, but it’s basically the same langauge) and another almost exactly (I thought the Bahasa guy was speaking Javanese, but he says he is just speaking Bahasa with Java slang….so…). For the Dari woman, I guessed Azeri – clearly not Farsi but obviously related. As with Shanghainese girl (which I guessed totally wrong), though, both here and the Dari woman grew up in the US and speak an oddly-enunciated version of these languages, which makes it tough (to be fair, the English speakers guessing also have a very Brooklyn Hipster Doofus style of speech which makes their English odd as well!). The Gujarati guy I just got totally wrong.

    Not bad! Unlike the April post, I would have preferred to see more “tough” ones – no languages from the Americas, no Bantu languages, no Papuan/Aboriginal languages – all of them this time are from major language families and all are fairly well-known. I would have liked to see who can identify Tok Pisin or Ojibwe!

  3. David Eddyshaw says
    December 11, 2023 at 9:22 pm

    I got Romanian, which I actually recognised, and guessed right with Somali (the pharyngeal [ʕ] helped, especially as it clearly wasn’t Arabic, and being able to actually see the chap was a help that the participants didn’t have.)

    Matthew the Music is practically uncanny, though getting people to count to ten strikes me as cheating …

  4. Y says
    December 11, 2023 at 10:48 pm

    I’d never heard Shanghainese before. It’s beautiful.

    Mamaliga in a romantic dinner? Really? Isn’t that just basic filler?

  5. languagehat says
    December 11, 2023 at 11:36 pm

    Mamaliga in a romantic dinner? Really? Isn’t that just basic filler?

    Yes, but to be fair, Romanian food (like Czech food) isn’t exactly known for its romance-inducing delicacies.

  6. Y says
    December 11, 2023 at 11:41 pm

    To be fair, I can see an American guy of that age thinking of cheeseburgers and fries as something to have on a date.

  7. languagehat says
    December 11, 2023 at 11:42 pm

    Too true!

  8. Zaelic says
    December 12, 2023 at 1:04 am

    Mamaliga in a romantic dinner? Just label it polenta and nobody will notice (except, maybe, a Romanian.)

  9. drasvi says
    December 12, 2023 at 8:40 am

    Y, well, the lady who asked me for a fingal is generally positive about McDonald’s (but again for a Russian student it is a somewhat exotic place and not too cheap).
    I think a date is the ONLY situation when I can seriously consider eating there.

    I also once invited a lady to Colonel Sanders’s abode but that was because she was watching the dedicated episode of South Park and I realised there is one not far from where we were living (we shared a room for a couple of weeks) and it was not a date. I did not like the taste:(

    As for mamaliga… Perhaps it can be converted into sushi (mamaligamaki), but properly preparing rice for sushi is not exactly a trivial task and not every variety of rice works. Same can be true for maize. Then you will need a different sauce and something else instead of fish maybe….Locusts?

  10. Y says
    December 12, 2023 at 11:01 am

    Locust and mamaliga sushi. You got my attention.

  11. drasvi says
    December 12, 2023 at 11:56 am

    Now I got my attention as well. I was going to specify that I meant rolls, but then I imagined a piece of sushi and could see that a whole locust on top of it would be visually more attractive. And that’s how I got my attention…

  12. Rodger C says
    December 12, 2023 at 2:31 pm

    For the Dari woman, I guessed Azeri – clearly not Farsi but obviously related.

    Maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying, but Azeri is a Turkic language.

  13. Kevin says
    December 12, 2023 at 6:52 pm

    Correct, Turkic in origin, but with really heavy grammatical and word influence from Persian compared to other Turkic languages.

  14. Vanya says
    December 13, 2023 at 2:36 am

    The Romanian guy was speaking Romanian with what sounded to me like a heavy American accent (but also pretty fluent – strange combination). I speak Romanian, so immediately knew what it was but it seemed unfair to the people who had to guess.

  15. Nat Shockley says
    December 13, 2023 at 12:12 pm

    The Romanian guy was speaking Romanian with what sounded to me like a heavy American accent (but also pretty fluent – strange combination). I speak Romanian, so immediately knew what it was but it seemed unfair to the people who had to guess.

    I agree! I don’t really know any Romanian but I’m very familiar with the Romanian accent (as heard when Romanians speak other languages) and the absence of it here completely threw me off. I wonder if that was partly Matthew’s problem too.
    I could hear his American accent very clearly though – and I already suspected that would cause difficulty for me in working out what language it was.

  16. David Marjanović says
    December 13, 2023 at 12:18 pm

    Azeri also sounds a lot more like Persian than Turkish does. Full of [ɒ].

    Mamaliga in a romantic dinner? Really? Isn’t that just basic filler?

    In Berlin, polenta is sold in ridiculously small quantities at ridiculously high prices, and not in every supermarket. Couscous too. I have to import both from Austria.

  17. Rodger C says
    December 14, 2023 at 2:10 pm

    Azeri also sounds a lot more like Persian than Turkish does.

    So i guess Azeri is like (Literary) Turkish (Osmanlı) before Atatürk? Or do I misunderstand?

  18. Christopher Culver says
    December 14, 2023 at 2:36 pm

    “Mamaliga in a romantic dinner?”

    When I was a young backpacker hitchhiking through rural Georgia, among the several times I was brusquely grabbed by the arm and dragged into a family’s home (so insistent is local hospitality), I was fed several opulent dishes. And mamaligă too, and under that same name. I found this incongruent, but the family seemed to believe mamaligă was equal to the rest of the stuff. My saying “oh, mamaligă, of course I know this, coming from Romania” proved a faux pas, as the family was insistent that it was a Georgian dish and, if it was present in Romania, it must have been stolen from the Georgians.

  19. Christopher Culver says
    December 14, 2023 at 2:41 pm

    “I’m very familiar with the Romanian accent (as heard when Romanians speak other languages)”

    For the refined ear, there are multiple Romanian accents in other languages. I can often tell if my interlocutor is from Transylvania, as opposed to the south or east, from the way that he or she speaks English. (Granted, I may be picking up some body-language cues and mistakenly crediting the accent. Some formal study of the phenomenon may be welcome.)

  20. David Marjanović says
    December 14, 2023 at 3:08 pm

    Doesn’t surprise me – there are plenty of different German accents in English.

    So i guess Azeri is like (Literary) Turkish (Osmanlı) before Atatürk? Or do I misunderstand?

    I wouldn’t know, I don’t know if the pronunciation in Turkey has changed. But I’d be rather surprised if the Turkish unrounded [ɑ] turned out to be such a recent reversal. I’m talking about a in both languages.

    (Next to no idea about the rest – I’ve heard very little Azeri.)

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