[HN Gopher] European word translator: an interactive map showing...
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European word translator: an interactive map showing words in over
30 languages
Author : gnabgib
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-02-23 19:53 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ukdataexplorer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ukdataexplorer.com)
| enriquto wrote:
| Love that the numbers in Catalan are represented as numerals, not
| as words.
|
| EDIT: playing with it, it's a bit sad that large numbers do not
| work at all (in any language); and that not all common forms of a
| word are shown. For example, I tried to see how "ninety six" is
| said in french in France, Belgium and Switzerland, but it does
| not work.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| As a French, I always found that the way Wallons or Swiss word
| out numbers >69 makes way more sense than ours
| watwut wrote:
| As a no French, I love French numbers you dislike. 90 being 4
| 20 10 is something sort of awesome and funny.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| I often wondered if the fact your number system forces you to
| multiply somehow affects your mathematical competence. France
| has won a lot of Fields medals.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The English number system kind of also forces you to
| multiply. Ninety-six is nine tens plus six, or 9*10+6.
| French is just special because they randomly sneak in base
| 20. But I doubt they really think more about saying 4 score
| plus sixteen then you do about saying nine tens plus six.
|
| What is more influential (in a detrimental way) is German
| randomly switching reading direction. They read 2196 as
| 2000+100+6+90 instead of the more reasonable 2000+100+90+6
| OptionOfT wrote:
| Growing in Belgium, we learned that our Walloon brethren use
| septante (70), quatre-vingts (4 * 20 or 80) and nonante (90).
|
| We never learned huitante (80), but here are apparently parts
| of Belgium that use is. We did learn soixante-dix and quatre-
| vingts-dix, and were allowed to use both. [0]
|
| The Swiss also use huitante, and Nova Scotia uses octante.
|
| [0]: Funnily enough, writing American English was a no-go. We
| had to write centre, colour, metre, lift (elevator), ticket
| (receipt).
| kozak wrote:
| Ukrainian and russian words often use the same letters but are
| pronounced very differently due to distinct phonetics. On the
| other hand, some Polish and Czech words sound the same or very
| similar to Ukrainian but look quite different because of their
| different alphabets. Therefore, phonetic transcription would be a
| valuable improvement.
| reader9274 wrote:
| You immediately see the difference (or similarly) of languages
| when using words that are very old, such as "iron", or "stone",
| which are words that have existed from the origins of that
| language.
| lqet wrote:
| Also "cow". And "sun", "mama" and "papa" seem to transcended
| most European languages.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| salt, tea, ..
|
| one can follow migrations.. and criss-crosses..
|
| btw, "orange" as color in Bulgarian is still "orange"
| (oranzhev/a/o/i), but "orange" as fruit is _portokal_ (
| "portokal") - so that's tricky..
|
| "oranges" seems more correct, vs "orange color" maybe
| adrian_b wrote:
| Salt and tea are good examples for the 2 reasons that can
| be the cause for finding the same word in many languages.
|
| Salt is an ancient Indo-European word that was already in
| use several millennia ago, so it has been inherited in most
| Indo-European languages.
|
| Tea is a relatively recent borrowing in the European
| languages, which has spread from one language to another,
| with a few pronunciation variants, across all Europe,
| regardless of the genetic relationships between languages.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Poland took issue with the story that worldwide there are
| only two words for tee, and which one you use depends on
| whether you got introduced to tea via sea or via land
| adrian_b wrote:
| For some words, their identity is not obvious when you do not
| know the rules for the changes of sounds between the Indo-
| European language subfamilies.
|
| For instance "cow" and "Kuh" come from the same word as
| "boeuf" and "buey" (also despite the gender difference).
| nedt wrote:
| I can mostly speak for German. It seems to mix them all into one
| general language. But there are a lot of local differences
| between north and south of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. And
| it's not just dialect, but really different words that might not
| be understood everywhere. If you look at the english part it has
| at least three different words. Similar in Spanish.
| lqet wrote:
| > And it's not just dialect, but really different words that
| might not be understood everywhere. If you look at the english
| part it has at least three different words. Similar in Spanish.
|
| I think you cannot really compare the minuscule differences
| between "Standard German", "Austrian Standard German", and
| "Swiss Standard German" to the differences between English,
| Irish and Welsh, which are not even from the same language
| family. Also, the tool is based on Google Translate, and AFAIK
| Google Translate doesn't differentiate between them.
|
| Comparing the tool to this map [0], it seems to do a pretty
| good job in capturing all major languages in Europe, while
| ignoring their dialects.
|
| But I agree that I would be great if you could zoom into the
| map and also show differences in local dialects. ChatGPT seems
| to be pretty good at translating to different variants of
| standard German, or German dialects [1]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#/media/Fil...
|
| [1]
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67bba4db-9458-800c-b5f8-fd3fa196d4...
| wongarsu wrote:
| My best guess:
|
| - Swiss German and Austrian German didn't make the cut because
| Switzerland and Austria are on good terms with Germany and
| don't mind if we call their languages a dialect of German. Not
| only is that justification to exclude them, they are also not
| in Google translate for this reason (which this map uses)
|
| - Luxembourg did mind and went to great lengths to get their
| German dialect recognized as a separate language, is in Google
| translate, but Wikipedia lists them as only 300k speakers
|
| - Frisian is seen as a distinct language because of how
| different it is, is in Google translate, but has about 200k
| speakers
|
| - Similarly, Scottish Garlic is in Google translate has only
| 70k-200k speakers
|
| The map is consistent if you set the goal of only considering
| languages that are in Google translate and have at least 500k
| speakers.
|
| I do think these rules detract from the map. Frisian and
| Luxembourgish are interesting as "in-between" languages
| (Luxemburgish has a lot of French influence, Frisian is closer
| related to English). And Swiss German has many distinct words
| that are very different from their German counterparts, so for
| the purposes of this map it really should be a language.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| There are examples from five language families shown here: Indo-
| European, Basque, Uralic, Turkic, and Afro-Asiatic.
|
| The words for bridge split neatly into language subfamilies. The
| only exception appears to be Welsh.
| dvh wrote:
| You are coloring it by 4 colors like map but you should color
| countries phonetically (speex, levenshtein or something similar)
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(page generated 2025-02-23 23:00 UTC)