Tell Similar Languages Apart
possibly a BadWikiName but as we all know, I'm not so good with those anyway so:
how do I TellSimilarLanguagesApart
How do I tell if something is Norwegian, Danish, or Swedish?
this is pretty much a touch and go case (like all languages) but take for example the sentence
'Until night becomes day'
- Tills natt bliver dag - in Danish Til natt blir dag - in Norwegian Tills natten blivit dag - in Swedish
furthermore it is worth noting that the Norwegians and Danes write with the vowels æ ø å, but the Swedes use ä ö å
Chinese / Japanese / Korean ?
Telling the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Korean isn't difficult if you know what to look for.
Chinese
Chinese is written entirely in Chinese characters (also known as han characters or hanzi in Chinese). These are the most complex fullwidth characters. If there's no hiragana, katakana or hangul used, it's highly likely that it's Chinese.
Japanese
Japanese also uses Chinese characters (known as kanji in Japanese), but hiragana and katakana are also used. Both hiragana and katakana only have 46 basic characters each, so you're more likely to see the same characters used more than once.
Korean
Korean now uses very few Chinese characters (none at all in North Korea) and it would be quite rare to find Korean CDs with Chinese characters. Instead, Korean uses hangul. Although the number of actual characters is rather high like with Chinese characters, hangul syllables are made up of letters in a way which is rather like playing Tetris with your letters. For example, ㅅ (s) and ㅏ (a) give 사 (sa) and adding ㅇ (ng) gives 상 (sang). (Can people see these OK? --Nikki)
The characters for the word "of" are usually rather common, they are 的, の and 의 in Chinese, Japanese and Korean respectively.
This bit could do with some example sentences, but the only sentence I can do in all three is "My cat is black"... --Nikki
- hmm. it would be neat if you added that sentence tough ;) ~mo
Further down this page is some idea of other 'similar languages' I've placed them all in italics because it's generally a mess anyway. I am unsure of for example polish should be a 'german language' (or even if that's the name that should be used) or where Dutch fits in, also this page needs intervingling also there are a lot more languages that could be confused for another language.
- Polish is slavic, like Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, etc. --Nikki
Basically I would like if people could come to this page and try order out languages and especially come up with sentence-examples or straight up grammar rules that made the destination between languages easier decipherable for those of us not speaking that (or those) language(s)
- I'm quite good at guessing languages, I'll try and help explain how my brain does it. :) --Nikki
I am not a professor of my own language or the Scandinavian languages either. please help if I have made any errors here to.
Lastly this page also needs to be wiki-textformated.
How do I tell if something is Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian?
- I have never studied Italian nor Portuguese, but French uses pronouns a lot more than Spanish. Maybe it would be good to list things like that. For French, there's je, tu, il, elle, on, nous, vous, ils and elles. "And" is "et" and the articles are le, la, les and un and une. French can have a cedilla on the c (ç), an acute accent on e (é), a grave accent on a, e and u (à, è, ù) or a diaeresis or circumflex on any vowel (ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, â, ê, î, ô, û) (does y count? : No--DonRedman). Also, no verbs that I can think of end in -o (like the Spanish 1st person singular present tense). There's also Catalan and Romanian which are Latin/Romance languages ---Nikki Apart from grammar, distinguishing Italian could be quite simple: almost all (in fact all) words end with a vowel (aeiou or àèìòù). Words in other latin language often end differently. --ClutchEr2
- Perhaps a table of pronouns and articles could help (Please correct my Spanish if some of it is wrong. Also is there any roman language that has neutrum?--DonRedman:
| English (for comparison) | French | Spanish | Norwegian |
| I | je, me, moi, m' | yo | jeg |
| you | tu, te, toi, t' | tu | du |
| he, she, it | il, elle, se, s', lui | ello, ella | han, hun, det |
| we | nous, on | nos(otros) | vi |
| you (plural) | vous | vos(otros) | dere |
| they | ils, elles | ellos, ellas | dem |
| and | et | y | og |
| the | le, la, les, l' | el, la | -en, -a, -et |
| a | un, une | un, una | en, ei, et |
| not | ne ... pas, n'... pas | no | ikke |
How do I tell if something is German, Austrian or Polish?
- Isn't German spoken in Austria? This should probably be German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic... --Nikki Dutch is spoken in The Netherlands and the northern part of Belgium. It can be distinguished by the use of the words 'de' (de vrouw), 'het' (het huis) and 'een' (een persoon), meaning 'the' (the woman), 'the' (the house) and 'a' (a person) (or 'one' (one person)). It's not unusual for words to have more than 2 vowels in a row. e.g. 's Nachts na tweeën. More hints at CapitalizationStandardDutch. --zout
how do i tell if something is Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese, how about Indonesian?
- (Covered CJK further up the page) Vietnamese is written with the latin alphabet normally with a ton of accents, Indonesian tends to have longer words (and no accents). --Nikki
