PICK THE RIGHT ROMANCE.

November 23, 2013 by 50 Comments

An enjoyable quiz: “Can you pick the [Romance] language in which the given sentence is written?” (created by Norwegian_dude); I’m a little dubious about including Esperanto on the basis that “most of its words” derive from Romance, but big deal, it just adds to the fun. I got 11 out of 11; I wouldn’t recognize Romansh on its own, but it was easy enough to get by elimination.

Comments

  1. marie-lucie says
    November 23, 2013 at 3:04 pm

    Merci!

  2. Y says
    November 23, 2013 at 4:45 pm

    Not bad, but throw in Ladin, Friulian, Venetian, Corsican, Gascon, and a few others, and I would be lost.

  3. languagehat says
    November 23, 2013 at 6:22 pm

    Yes, it would be nice to have an expanded version.

  4. John Cowan says
    November 24, 2013 at 12:53 am

    Romansh is essentially Romance spelled as if it were German.

  5. dearieme says
    November 24, 2013 at 8:10 am

    My wife speaks little bits of Spanish and Italian at the useful-for-a-tourist level, and finds it hard not to muddle them. French isn’t a problem, she says, because her school taught her to read and write it but scarcely to speak it.

  6. iakon says
    November 24, 2013 at 1:31 pm

    The clue for me to recognize Romansh was ‘tgau’, pretty obviously equivalent to ‘ciao’. I’m sure I would have trouble with those suggested by Y.

  7. Trond Engen says
    November 24, 2013 at 2:30 pm

    9 here, first missing one for not having understood I could postpone the difficult ones and then another for hitting the wrong field on my touchscreen. But I almost ran out of time too, so I don’t know if I could have scored any more.

  8. languagehat says
    November 24, 2013 at 2:52 pm

    not having understood I could postpone the difficult ones
    Ah, I hadn’t noticed the “Next” button. Nice feature.

  9. bulbul says
    November 25, 2013 at 4:16 am

    11/11, yesss. But why these eleven and why not include, say, Provençal, Galician or Aranese?
    Also, is anybody working on the Slavic version yet? I could do it, but you just know I will put it the weirdest stuff…

  10. Hans says
    November 25, 2013 at 6:08 am

    11/11. The fact that all of them have different orthographical conventions really comes in handy.

  11. minus273 says
    November 25, 2013 at 9:14 am

    Please, bulbul.

  12. marie-lucie says
    November 25, 2013 at 9:18 am

    Why not more languages?
    Give the guy a break! These must be languages that he knows or is learning. The sentence is the type that occurs (or can be put together) in the first few lessons of a language textbook:     My name is X, I am 11 years old, my father is 39 years old, my grandmother is 74 years old, etc, hence the disparity in the ages in the translations. No textbook for a language, no place for it on the quiz.
    Muddling Spanish and Italian: many nouns are the same individually in the singular, eg vino ‘wine’, casa ‘house’, but a major giveaway is the noun plurals: Sp año, años, It anno, anni ‘year/years’; Sp casa, casas, It casa, case ‘house/houses’. Of course there are many other clues but this one is quite striking.

  13. languagehat says
    November 25, 2013 at 11:57 am

    I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but when my family was living in Buenos Aires we used a plumber who had immigrated from Italy (like so many Argentines) many years before and had forgotten most of his Italian, but had never learned Spanish properly, so that he spoke a sort of mishmosh; I was the only one in the family who could effectively communicate with him.

  14. Dreas says
    November 26, 2013 at 12:24 am

    Yes, it’s too easy if you’re familiar with the orthography of modern Romance languages.
    Incidentally, I suspect the variety of Rheto-Romance represented in the quiz is not Romantsch Grischun. More likely one of the dialects the emerging literary standards is based on – which lead to Romantsch Grischun. I’m a native speaker of German, so I find the mixture of Romance and Germanic fun – in the vocabulary too.
    bulbul: if you have the time and feel like putting together such a quiz for Slavic languages, I would only stand a chance if it was based on written languages. I can’t for the life of me hear a differrence between Czech and Slovak. I would bet 1€ that I can I distinguish Galego from Portuguese, but not Slovak from Czech.

  15. Alexei K. says
    November 26, 2013 at 3:04 am

    “not Slovak from Czech.” Depends on the clues. If you see an r or an e with a hachek/caron, it must be Czech.

  16. bulbul says
    November 26, 2013 at 3:55 am

    Dreas,
    really? To my ears, Czech has some very distinct prosody patterns, much like Hungarian.
    Alexei,
    you don’t really think I’d make it that easy, do you?

  17. languagehat says
    November 26, 2013 at 9:20 am

    I hereby announce in advance I’m not going to get a perfect score on bulbul’s test.

  18. minus273 says
    November 26, 2013 at 10:07 am

    If every other vowel is í and even -ный adjectives have -ní then that’s Czech. Easy.

  19. David Marjanović says
    November 26, 2013 at 12:08 pm

    Romansh is essentially Romance spelled as if it were German.

    That’s true for sch and *facepalm* tsch, but not for tg [dʒ]; that one’s taken from Catalan on the grounds of “come on, I have to put something Romance-looking in there”.

    I can’t for the life of me hear a differrence between Czech and Slovak.

    Wait for long enough, and a ř will surface in Czech but not in Slovak.
    If you wait really long, an ô might surface in Slovak. However, don’t count on a ľ to show up; I strongly suspect western Slovak doesn’t have it.

    really? To my ears, Czech has some very distinct prosody patterns, much like Hungarian.

    Like Hungarian, Czech outside of (parts of?) Silesia takes its long vowels amazingly seriously, no matter how unstressed they are. Slovak… perhaps less and less so as you go east?

    Also, is anybody working on the Slavic version yet? I could do it, but you just know I will put it the weirdest stuff…

    Challenge accepted.

  20. marie-lucie says
    November 26, 2013 at 3:59 pm

    Bulbul, that’s unfair! The Romance quiz (as I pointed out) is based on a very simple sentence, on the level of the first chapter or two of learning a language from a textbook. Or do you intend to chose something both very simple and very weird?

  21. Etienne says
    November 26, 2013 at 4:23 pm

    Dreas: I think you are right; unless my sources are misleading me the Romansh in the quizz is Sursilvan (demographically the most important dialect) and not Romantsch Grischun.
    And while I did get 11/11 on the Romance quizz, I hereby announce that, like our cyberhost, I will definitely NOT get a perfect score on a Slavic language identification game. Indeed, if Bulbul creates it, and if his answer to Alexei above is any clue, I suspect I will get none of them right. I can see it already… (“How could you mix up Child Eastern Slovak and obsolescent Silesian Polish, you fool? Almost as unforgivable a blunder as mixing up Croatian teen slang and L2 non-standard Serbian! And may I add that a toothless elderly speaker of Southern Russian and a seriously intoxicated speaker of an Eastern Ukrainian dialect will find each other mutually unintelligible, so the failure on the part of a so-called linguist such as yourself to tell them apart is frankly unbelievable!”)
    Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have written the above –I wouldn’t want to give Bulbul or others any ideas… 🙂

  22. Alon Lischinsky says
    December 11, 2013 at 4:02 am

    @hat:

    I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but when my family was living in Buenos Aires we used a plumber who had immigrated from Italy (like so many Argentines) many years before and had forgotten most of his Italian, but had never learned Spanish properly, so that he spoke a sort of mishmosh; I was the only one in the family who could effectively communicate with him.

    That was a pretty common phenomenon. The resulting pidgin (known as cocoliche) was widely understood in Buenos Aires by the early 20th century, and became a staple of comic theatre before going extinct as the immigrants themselves died off. Their children invariably acquired the standard, although a good deal of cocoliche survives today as plain Rioplatense Spanish.

    Possibly the best piece on cocoliche I’ve ever read is buried in a hard-to-find edited collection: Lavandera, Beatriz R. (1978). The variable component in bilingual performance. In: Alatis, James E. (ed.), International Dimensions of Bilingual Education. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP (pp. 391–409).

    To go back on topic, I’d love a version with Ladin, Friulian, Venetian, Corsican, Gascon, Aragonese, Galician and the rest thrown in.

  23. languagehat says
    December 11, 2013 at 8:42 am

    Thanks, that’s interesting to know!

  24. Alon Lischinsky says
    December 13, 2013 at 2:17 pm

    Do you read Italian, hat? If so, this seems an interesting intro to the phenomenon.

  25. languagehat says
    December 13, 2013 at 2:21 pm

    I do, more or less, so grazie!

  26. SFReader says
    October 4, 2019 at 10:36 am

    I suppose it’s common mistake to make, but I actually encountered it for the first time:

    “He was familiar enough with Italian and most of the Romantic languages”

  27. John Cowan says
    October 4, 2019 at 11:20 am

    The hard Romance quiz.

  28. Trond Engen says
    October 4, 2019 at 6:18 pm

    My wife just signed up for an Italian course. I knew she would be having a Romance.

  29. David Eddyshaw says
    October 4, 2019 at 6:49 pm

    Not sure about calling Haitian Creole a Romance language.

    As we say in Germanic, A no go giri.

  30. SFReader says
    October 5, 2019 at 1:49 am

    Let’s call it Frenchic.

  31. zyxt says
    October 5, 2019 at 8:48 pm

    Here is a sentence from various Slavic languages (from Kondrašov’s “Slavjanskie jazyki”, 1955). Can you guess which language is which?
    (Cyrillic transcribed into Latin)

    1. Korčagin ohopiv golovu rukami i tjažko zamislivsja.
    2. Korczagin objął głowę rękoma i głęboko się zamyślił.
    3. Korčagin se je prijel za glavo in se pogreznil v težke misli.
    4. Korčagin ohvatil golovu rukami i tjaželo zadumalsja.
    5. Korčagin složil hlavu do dlaní a hluboce se zamyslil.
    6. Karčagin abhapił galavu rukami i cjažka zadumałsja.
    7. Korčagin hvana glavata si s r’ce i težko se zamisli.
    8. Korčagin si podoprel hlavu rukami a hlboko sa zamyslel.
    9. Korčagin obuhvati glavu rukama i teško se zamisli.

    The writing system gives most of the answers away, so as an extra question, where does this sentence come from?

  32. Anonymous Coward says
    October 5, 2019 at 9:24 pm

    1, 4, 6 have polnoglasie: ukr (with ɦ transcribed as g) rus and bel (conspicuous akanye)
    2 is evidently Polish
    3 no idea at all, Slovenian?
    5, 8 either Czech or Slovak: I’ll randomly guess that 5 = Czech and 8 = Slovak
    7 has articles, must be Bulgarian or its smaller standard-language sister
    9 instrumental -ama looks like standard BCMS

    I grow up in a country where Bǎoěr Kēchájīn is staple reading, so the extra question is much easier for me than the identification questions.

  33. David Eddyshaw says
    October 5, 2019 at 9:26 pm

    1 is Ukrainian, 2 is Polish, 5 is Czech, and the sentence comes from Kondrašov’s “Slavjanskie jazyki.” Or possibly Ostrovsky. Or both.

    (Personally, I think I’ve done extremely well for someone who knows no Slavonic languages whatsoever, even if I’m wrong. Especially if I’m wrong.)

  34. D.O. says
    October 5, 2019 at 10:15 pm

    4 is Russian, 6 is Belorussian.
    9 is Bulgarian? I only think that because it is very close to Russian, but outside independent states of former Soviet Union. By the way, those 3 are the only ones that do not employ “self” particle. I am sure, Kondrashov explained all of it in minute details.

    The translations are not the ideal copies from Russian to whatever language: 1,2,4,6,9 (and probably 7) tell that Korchagin put his head between his hands and 5 and 8 say that he merely rested his head on his hand. I can not make out what 3 does with it. It’s also interesting that “deep in thought” is sometimes “deep” and sometimes “heavy” (both would be natural in Russian).

  35. SFReader says
    October 5, 2019 at 11:45 pm

    Ukrainian
    Polish
    Slovenian
    Russian
    Czech
    Belarussian
    Bulgarian
    Slovak
    Serbo-Croatian.

    The sentence is from Soviet classic “How the Steel Was Tempered“ by Nikolay Ostrovsky.

  36. David Marjanović says
    October 6, 2019 at 7:27 am

    Specifically…

    1. Ukrainian, because -v instead of -l. Further East Slavic because -olo- and -sja.
    2. Polish spelling gives everything away. Also, there’s nothing to suggest it’s not Polish (like Kashubian for instance).
    3. Slovene because “and” is in.
    4. No evidence that it’s not Russian.
    5. No evidence that it’s not Czech; see below for Slovak.
    6. Belarusian spelled in łacinka; akannje spelled out as usual.
    7. Article means Bulgarian or Macedonian; ‘ (ъ) eliminates Macedonian. Also note the lack of case inflection on r’ce.
    8. Could be Czech, except that -el is weirder than Czech, so Slovak it is…
    9. -ama means FYLOSC, even though I don’t understand why the infinitive obuhvati is playing finite.

  37. zyxt says
    October 7, 2019 at 9:19 am

    Impressive – very good knowledge of the Slavic languages by everyone.

    The answers are as per SFR Reader, including the source book and author.

    D.O.: “pogrezniti” means “to sink” or “to submerge”.

    Anonymous Coward is correct about Ukrainian ɦ is transcribed as g. I tried positing in Cyrillic, but that didn’t work, so I transcribed the Cyrillic into Latin.

    I originally transcribed w rather than ł for Belarussian, but changed it to ł for etymological reasons. Nice to know that I was using łacinka without realising it.

    The Bulgarian “hvana” seems like a typo to me. Should it be “hvata”?

    David Marjanović: “obuhvati” is aorist 3rd person singular of “obuhvatiti” (to clasp, to embrace).

    The language is described as Serbo-Croatian in the book, but on reading the whole passage it is clear this is actually the “Eastern variant” as it was called at the time – now referred to as the Serbian language.

    What I found intriguing is the use of “How the Steel Was Tempered“ as a comparison text for the different languages. This is an interesting change from the use of a biblical text that one finds in Western linguistic works for this purpose. Although Kondrašov also covered Old Slavonic, Sorbian and Macedonian, it appears that there was no translation of “How the Steel Was Tempered“ in those languages available as at 1955. Perhaps it is obvious why there was no translation into Old Slavonic, but it would be interesting to know if there were ever any translations into Sorbian and Macedonian.

  38. zyxt says
    October 7, 2019 at 9:50 am

    correction: To be fair to Kondrašov, the Croatian variant is treated in the book as well.

  39. January First-of-May says
    October 7, 2019 at 10:54 am

    Here are my guesses, going from the text only (i.e. trying to ignore the spoilers)…

    1. probably Ukrainian (looks like Russian, but isn’t quite Russian, and Belarussian is 6)
    2. Polish (spelling)
    3. I dunno
    4. Russian – as a native speaker I obviously recognize it
    5. Czech, I think
    6. Belarussian (the mostly-phonetic spelling)
    7. Bulgarian (spelling, in particular the “r’ce” that clearly has the Bulgarian ъ vowel)
    8. well, if 5 is Czech, and I think it is, this should be Slovak
    9. I dunno

    The obvious candidates for 3 and 9 are FYLOSC and Slovenian; if I had to guess I’d put some variety of FYLOSC at 9 (and thus Slovenian at 3), because 9 looks a lot more like the Croatian I recall from Slobodna Dalmacija.

    (It appears that I guessed everything correctly.)

  40. SFReader says
    October 7, 2019 at 11:59 am

    Quick and dirty secret for recognition of Slovenian.

    If an obviously Slavic sentence contains “in”, that’s Slovenian. No other Slavic language has it.

    Slovenian ‘in’ = Russian ‘i’ (‘and’).

  41. John Cowan says
    October 7, 2019 at 5:42 pm

    Sorbs could read it in German, and Slavo-Macedonians would have no problem with Bulgarian.

  42. John Cowan says
    October 7, 2019 at 6:14 pm

    The official romanization of Bulgarian since 2009 uses Latin a for both а and ъ, stupidly. The 2002 dictionary used ă for the latter a la Romanian, but it didn’t catch on. Also, more excusably, you don’t know if zh represents ж or зх (as in изход ‘gate’).

    And blah, and blah, and blahdideblah, and other lorem ipsum to make this get past the spam filter despite having a bit of Cyrillic in it.

  43. David Marjanović says
    October 7, 2019 at 7:38 pm

    I have next to no idea of the aorist.

    uses Latin a for both а and ъ, stupidly.

    As Pāṇini said: a a.

    Slavo-Macedonians would have no problem with Bulgarian

    …but that may not have been available before 1991 or even later.

  44. Hans says
    October 8, 2019 at 5:31 am

    I assume most Macedonians at that time would have been literate in FYLOSC and would have read that in that language, if interested.
    FWIW, the Macedonian Wikipedia page for the book doesn’t mention any Macedonian translation, and no Sorbian WP page for the book seems to exist.

  45. SFReader says
    October 8, 2019 at 6:01 am

    KAKO SE KALEŠE ČELIKOT; “Detska radost”, Skopje, 1979

  46. January First-of-May says
    October 8, 2019 at 7:39 am

    The official romanization of Bulgarian since 2009 uses Latin a for both а and ъ, stupidly.

    I think I’ve seen a version that used Latin u for both у and ъ… which admittedly probably isn’t much better.

    The problems with sh/zh (i.e. that they could be ш/ж or сх/зх) are endemic to Cyrillic transliteration; Russian has the same problem (somewhat tempered by the extreme rarity* of зх, but сх/ш has plenty of minimal pairs). The usual solution is to either render х as kh (not ch – that’s ч), or invent new letters for ш/ж (and at that point usually for ч as well).

     
    *) and I do mean extreme rarity – it only occurs in some abbreviations, a bunch of foreign place names, a few exotic foreign words, several surnames, and some obsolete spellings; everywhere else it became сх

  47. SFReader says
    October 8, 2019 at 7:56 am

    Kazakh Latin is even worse. According to new standard, the name of the ancestor of Kazakh Khans is to be written in Latin script as Shyngyshan.

  48. January First-of-May says
    October 8, 2019 at 9:21 am

    Kazakh Latin is even worse.

    Well, at least I think they’ve moved on from the standard that gave us Y’i’ki’pedi’i’a…

  49. Rodger C says
    October 9, 2019 at 8:54 am

    I could understand Shyngys’han (cf. Chang’an), but maybe they were in the throes of a reaction against apostrophes.

  50. January First-of-May says
    October 9, 2019 at 9:02 am

    cf. Chang’an

    Чанъань in Russian, conveniently using the hard sign separator.

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