Spoken Language Quiz II.

August 27, 2019 by 46 Comments

A few years ago I posted Spoken Language Quiz; here’s another one from Babbel, which is pretty hard (I only got half right). Try it if you dare! (Hat tip to Bathrobe.)

Comments

  1. AJP Crown says
    August 27, 2019 at 3:12 pm

    I got 5 out of 8! I’m so proud of myself. I missed – well, I shouldn’t say.

  2. nemanja says
    August 27, 2019 at 3:35 pm

    I got 7/8 though admittedly some were just a lucky guess (Indonesian). The one I missed was Polish (I answered Ukrainian). Confirming my suspicion that Polish is the black sheep of Slavic languages.

  3. Roberto Batisti says
    August 27, 2019 at 4:03 pm

    5 out of 8. The easy ones were quite easy. Those I got wrong, I didn’t have the faintest clue about. The older quiz I found much easier (got 8/8, and note that I emphatically do not speak or understand most of the languages that came up).

  4. Brett says
    August 27, 2019 at 6:41 pm

    I got six out of eight, but Indonesian was mostly a lucky guess, and I also had to guess between Polish and Ukrainian. On the other hand, I faked myself out and guessed Icelandic instead of Norwegian, because I though the Norwegian did not sound quite right. (My colleague one office over is Norwegian, and he has a distinctly different accent—more Bergen than Oslo, I think.) The other one I missed was misidentifying the French as Haitian.

  5. David Eddyshaw says
    August 27, 2019 at 6:52 pm

    6/8.

    I said Malay for Indonesian and Swedish for Norwegian. Distinctions without a difference!

  6. Trond Engen says
    August 27, 2019 at 7:11 pm

    6 out of 8 after forcing myself not to read the comments.

    @Brett: The Norwegian clip is short, and you’re right that it doesn’t sound quite right. First, it’s very Riksmål/Oslo Vest in the phonology. Second each word is clearly pronponced as a unit. Together these means that there’s littIe of the characterisitc retroflex sounds and clusters of Central Scandinavian. I hear the clip as ]’tak for ‘jelpen me ‘sufaen], while my half-broad Eastern would be [‘tak fo’jæLpa me’sufan]. Third, the sentence tone is modulated in a radio theatre sort of way, as if meant to be pleasant rather than natural.

  7. minus273 says
    August 27, 2019 at 7:48 pm

    7/8 failed on the Norwegian (took that for Swedish). Spoken Malaysian Malay has [ə] for final a, so for example [sajə] for saya, so distinguishing it from Indonesian is not impossible.

  8. languagehat says
    August 27, 2019 at 9:11 pm

    The Norwegian clip is short, and you’re right that it doesn’t sound quite right. First, it’s very Riksmål/Oslo Vest in the phonology. Second each word is clearly pronponced as a unit. Together these means that there’s littIe of the characterisitc retroflex sounds and clusters of Central Scandinavian.

    That makes me feel better about missing it!

  9. Vanya says
    August 28, 2019 at 12:31 am

    8/8. Easy except for Norwegian, which I guessed (but knew it couldn‘t be Danish). Just by chance I speak, or have at least studied, 7 of the 8 languages she selected for the quiz.

  10. AJP Crown says
    August 28, 2019 at 4:47 am

    I don’t think Trond’s saying that the clip could be confused with Swedish, just that it sounds artificial for Urban East Norwegian (Oslo).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#/media/File:Map_of_the_major_tonal_dialects_of_Norwegian_and_Swedish.png

  11. Bathrobe says
    August 28, 2019 at 4:54 am

    It’s just clickbait for Babbel, which offers a pathetic range of languages. But perhaps that’s just sour grapes on my part for getting 4/8!

    Know nothing of Slavic and very little about Nordic. And I didn’t even notice Indonesian on the list; went straight to Malay. minus273’s knowledge of detail is admirable.

  12. Tore says
    August 28, 2019 at 7:03 am

    Even being a Swede myself, I had to listen to the Norwegian clip a couple of times before being certain. “Hjelpen” could have been some central Swedish dialect, but “soffan” sounded Norwegian. 7/8 – couldn’t tell the difference between Malay and Indonesian even though I have studied both slightly; thanks for the information about the final schwa!

  13. Trond Engen says
    August 28, 2019 at 7:40 am

    The difference in sentence melody and realization of tonality between Eastern Norwegian and Central/Western Swedish may be hard to perceive for a foreigner, but there’s actually one tonal clue in the clip. In Swedish (most?) borrowings with final a are placed in the old weak feminine declension, while in Norwegian they become masculines or neuters (maybe to avoid a definite suffix -a on a stem ending in a). This has the consequence that sofa is [¹sufa] in Norwegian and [²sufa] in Swedish. In the clip it’s the definite form [¹sufaen], [¹sufan] in my dialect, Swedish [²sufan].

    A non-tonal clue is the vowel in the preposition No. for, Swedish för.

  14. Trond Engen says
    August 28, 2019 at 7:44 am

    This stayed unposted for a while and I forgot to reload. It’s a relief that Tore confirms my story about sofa.

  15. Jongseong Park says
    August 28, 2019 at 11:22 am

    Having heard it just once, I also thought the Norwegian clip was some form of Swedish “Tack för hjälpen med soffan”, though I was uncertain about the final word. I don’t feel quite so bad now seeing the other comments. I did learn Swedish once upon a time but can’t really use tonal clues which seem to vary across dialects anyway. I usually need a longer passage or some really strong intonation to tell apart Swedish and Norwegian.

  16. Trond Engen says
    August 28, 2019 at 12:57 pm

    Yes, it’s very short, and tones are pronounced differently between dialects. What you probably picked up on, was the lack of difference in tone between hjelpen and sofa.

  17. Athel Cornish-Bowden says
    August 29, 2019 at 4:25 am

    Oh dear: the worst so far, 3/8. Better than random, anyway. The ones I got right were easy ones (French and Portuguese, and another that I don’t recall). I’m surprised I didn’t identify the Russian. I heard a lot of Russian in Riga a couple of weeks ago, and never confused it with Latvian.* I said Czech for the Polish, as I thought I detected initial stress. I was in Cracow in June, but I didn’t hear all that much Polish. I did learn, however, why the zloty is called that (though I don’t suppose that there is any gold in the modern coins).

    I don’t think they offered Russian as choice for Portuguese, but if they had it might have been less obvious.

    *Perhaps that implies that I think Latvian is similar to Russian. I don’t, but the languages I heard in Riga were English, Russian, Latvian and French (in that order), none of which could be confused with one of the others.

  18. Lars (the original one) says
    August 29, 2019 at 5:17 am

    7/8 — I had managed to forget the Malay/Indonesian/Thai comments so I was flying blind on that one and took a 1 in 4 chance, no luck.

    The Norwegian clip was really hard to tell from Swedish — not from Central Standard Swedish, but from some of the westerly regions. To my ear as a Dane with (self reported) good Swedish, for vs för was the only unambiguous feature.

    I was pretty sure I’d fail on Baltic or Slavic languages since my active knowledge ends at spasiba, but in the end I did pick out some useful features in the Polish and Russian samples; one word in /-awem/ for Polish, for Russian it was more impressionistic. (“Default speech organ position” kind of impression). If I’d knowingly heard the other languages spoken, I might have been more in doubt…

  19. David Marjanović says
    August 29, 2019 at 5:26 am

    Malay/Indonesian/Thai

    Thai is intensely tonal and has a large vowel inventory, I can’t imagine confusing it with the other two.

    (But I still haven’t tried the quiz. Maybe this evening.)

  20. Lars (the original one) says
    August 29, 2019 at 5:32 am

    Well, I have heard East Asian languages spoken even less than Slavic ones. But I did eliminate Thai on intuition so it was really a 1 in 3 guess.

  21. AJP Crown says
    August 29, 2019 at 5:42 am

    ACB I don’t think they offered Russian as choice for Portuguese

    I think Portuguese sounds a lot like Russian – or at least I did the one time I went to Brazil. I didn’t know if there’s a phonological explanation or if I’m just a bit deaf, so I’m glad it’s not just me.

  22. Father Jape says
    August 29, 2019 at 1:54 pm

    Many English speakers seem to find them similar too.
    I wonder if anyone else does…

  23. Luke says
    August 29, 2019 at 3:26 pm

    8/8! Although the Norwegian and the Indonesian were definitely guesses.

  24. languagehat says
    August 29, 2019 at 4:11 pm

    Bravo!

  25. David Marjanović says
    August 29, 2019 at 6:45 pm

    8/8 – but if I hadn’t read the comments first, I’d have been reduced to guessing not only between Norwegian and Swedish and between Malay and Indonesian, but also between the latter two and Tagalog.

    Polish was obvious after the first two words (teraz rozumiem – “now I understand”, fittingly enough): final fortition ruling out Ukrainian and FYLOSC, roz- instead of raz- ruling out practically everything except Polish, [mʲ] ruling out everything except Polish and East Slavic.

    Portuguese was obvious at the first [ẽĩ̯ʃ] (-ens); Russian has nothing similar.

  26. Athel Cornish-Bowden says
    August 30, 2019 at 5:23 am

    <iMany English speakers seem to find them similar too.
    I wonder if anyone else does…

    Not just English speakers. Once when I was on an exercise of assessing the quality of research in Portuguese chemistry laboratories, I met two Russians in Lisbon who were passing some time in the laboratory. They told me that when they were talking Russian in the street Portuguese passers by thought they were speaking Portuguese and were puzzled that they couldn’t understand a word. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t just me.

  27. Athel Cornish-Bowden says
    August 30, 2019 at 5:29 am

    I think Portuguese sounds a lot like Russian – or at least I did the one time I went to Brazil.

    For my ears it’s much more pronounced in Portugal than it is in Brazil. A few years ago I visited the Cataratus de Iguaçu (without my Spanish-speaking wife), and went on several tours in which I was the only non-Brazilian. The guide gave his talk first in Portuguese and then in English. I found I could get a fair idea of what he was saying from the Portuguese version. That wouldn’t have worked in Portugal, where they might as well have talked in Mongolian for all I could understand.

  28. juha says
    August 30, 2019 at 5:54 am

    I believe I’ve said this before, but when(ever) I heard José Mourinho speaking in English, I was struck that he was speaking with a Russian-like accent.

  29. nemanja says
    August 22, 2021 at 3:59 pm

    It’s really only European Portuguese that sounds like Russian – partly due to certain quirks of pronunciation that exist in Portugal but not in Brazil (mainly involving R and S sounds), but mainly, i would argue, due to the difference in prosody, as EP is stress timed (like Russian) while BP is syllable timed. Anecdotally, I’ve been working on my Portuguese at a pretty good clip for almost 4 years now and feel pretty comfortable conversing in Brazilian but find the European variant almost incomprehensible, in English terms its a bit like encountering a very strong Scouser accent or the like, where it’s hard to even make out the sounds let alone words or sentences.

  30. Alex K. says
    August 24, 2021 at 6:26 am

    @nemanja: “It’s really only European Portuguese that sounds like Russian – partly due to certain quirks of pronunciation that exist in Portugal but not in Brazil (mainly involving R and S sounds)…”

    The ‘s’ chiado occurs in some Brazilian sotaques as well, most notably in the Carioca accent of course but also in the Northeast. But Brazilians use uvular or velar realizations of R and RR way more than the Portuguese, plus they pronounce their terminal dark Ls as Ws – more Polish than Russian. I would add that EP has the unstressed /ɨ/ that doesn’t seem to occur in Brazil at all – sometimes it sounds like an unstressed Russian ы. On the other hand, EP has /ð/ and /β/ and BP does not.

    “…but mainly, i would argue, due to the difference in prosody, as EP is stress timed (like Russian) while BP is syllable timed.”

    Agreed, although I would add the strongly reduced vowels in EP. On the other hand, spoken BP can also be stress-timed, if not to the same degree as EP.

  31. David Marjanović says
    August 24, 2021 at 9:21 am

    I once met a EP who presented her name slowly & carefully as [ˌsiːdɛːˈlˠiːnɘː]. Turned out to be spelled Cidalina – vowel reduction is not optional.

  32. languagehat says
    August 24, 2021 at 9:44 am

    That’s great! But what’s an EP?

  33. Jen in Edinburgh says
    August 24, 2021 at 10:04 am

    From the comment above, European Portuguese? (which I cannot spell)

  34. Alex K. says
    August 24, 2021 at 10:07 am

    EP = European Portuguese, BP = Brasilian Portuguese, AP = Angolan Portuguese.

    @David Marjanović: “[ˌsiːdɛːˈlˠiːnɘː]… Cidalina…” Most textbooks would have /ɐ/ where you have /ɛ/ and /ɘ/: the general idea is that /a/ gets reduced by being raised to /ɐ/ and shortened. (It’s the least reduced of all the Portuguese vowels.) I imagine that educated EP speakers associate unstressed a’s with the /ɐ/ sound by default, although there are a few exceptions when a’s are not reduced at all.

  35. languagehat says
    August 24, 2021 at 10:50 am

    From the comment above, European Portuguese?

    D’oh! Something about “I once met a EP who…” made me think it was parallel to, say, RN = registered nurse.

  36. Vanya says
    August 24, 2021 at 11:01 am

    Late to the party but got 8/8. I had to guess Norwegian, but by chance I have studied all the other 7 languages at some point in my life so it was the easiest quiz yet.

  37. David Marjanović says
    August 24, 2021 at 3:47 pm

    Yes, I was spontaneously having fun with “EP”. Remind me to become a standup comedian.

    I once read that Portuguese dictionaries use ɐ for whatever the unstressed allophones of /a/ are, not necessarily [ɐ]. Maybe it actually represented [ɐ] 100 years ago. See also: French dictionaries writing the on sound as ɔ̃, even though it’s been [õ] – bon & beau are a minimal pair for nasality – for long enough that even m-l uses [õ] in her very conservative accent.

    The Cidalina in question was a biology postdoc, IIRC.

  38. Trond Engen says
    August 24, 2021 at 5:02 pm

    As chance would have it, I spoke to a real speaker of both EP and BP today, a Brazilian who moved to Portugal in her youth. I asked, as one does, about the differences between the two, but she dismissed the question, saying that the variation is much bigger within Brazil.

  39. languagehat says
    August 24, 2021 at 5:13 pm

    Never trust a native speaker.

  40. David Marjanović says
    August 24, 2021 at 5:21 pm

    The variation within BP could easily be larger than that within Standard EP. Once you add the dialects, I’m sure EP wins.

  41. Etienne says
    August 24, 2021 at 6:58 pm

    David Marjanović: Actually, I am not that sure: Portugal is a very homogeneous country, linguistically: by which I not only mean that almost 100% of its inhabitants are L1 speakers of Portuguese, but also that Portuguese within Portugal exhibits very little social or geographical variation: this state of affairs is due to the fact that Portuguese is not, historically, native to Portugal but to Galicia (which, tellingly, exhibits far more dialect diversity than Portugal).

    This is true of the Central and Southern Iberian peninsula more generally, where Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan are transplanted languages which were originally native to the Northern part of the Iberian peninsula. Which is why in the far North there is (or was, until comparatively recently) a dialect continuum stretching from Northern Catalonia all the way to Galicia, whereas over most of the peninsula there is (and there never has been) no dialect continuum linking Catalan and Spanish, or Spanish and Portuguese

  42. Alex K. says
    August 25, 2021 at 6:14 am

    @Etienne: You would also expect some dialect variety north of the Douro river in Portugal, since it came under Asturian/Galician/Leonese control as early as the 9th century. Braga was only briefly held by the Muslims, for 50-60 years perhaps, up to 868 AD. The only officially recognized minority language in Portugal, Mirandese, is spoken in a small town in the Northeast.

  43. Jen in Edinburgh says
    August 25, 2021 at 5:40 pm

    EP to me still means something longer than a single and shorter than an album, but although they have names, they are not usually shes

  44. Lars Mathiesen says
    August 27, 2021 at 2:42 am

    I guess you have to have learned French as a fourth language in a Danish high school in the seventies to have [bɔ̃], then. Not so much conservative as out of touch.

  45. David Marjanović says
    August 27, 2021 at 3:52 am

    Lots of Germans do that, too, I’ve found.

  46. Hans says
    August 27, 2021 at 6:50 am

    I have that as well. That’s how i learned it, but it’s also easier for me to nasalise lax vowels.

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