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Evvy :neofox_floof:

this is my flavor of autism :neocat:

A convoluted flowchart titled "Which European language am I reading?". It allows you to determine the language by which letters or combination of letters the text contains. The letters are from Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew and Greek scripts. There are a lot of languages, even the ones that have very few speakers.
62 comments
guenther

@avesbury_rosetta @pierogiburo

the chart doesn't say otherwise, does it?

the "ieuw" field is for that specific sequence of letters, not for "does it contain any of these?"

Aphrodite ☑️ :boost_ok:

@guenther @avesbury_rosetta @pierogiburo

yep!

clusters are sets of letters that are or are not find uniquely in a given language.

like «τσχ» is not found in Modern Greek anywhere but it’s common in Tsakonian.

Avebury Rosetta :transistor:

@guenther
Oh right gotcha, thought it was a set of letters in or not in a language

junipurr (Luna [Calliope Fork])

@pierogiburo@tech.lgbt someone should make this for every language at once

- posted by Luna [Calliope Fork]

Emily :verified_woem:

@pierogiburo@tech.lgbt idk about other languages but for polish this may not work if your text is short enough or whoever wrote it didn't bother with writing special characters. quite a lot of polish can be written unambiguously by simply replacing the special characters with their base letters

EnbyPT :neocat_flag_gay: :neocat_flag_pan:

@pierogiburo TIL the Sardinians have outdid us in doing the letter thing as little as possible

junipurr (Luna [Calliope Fork])

@pierogiburo@tech.lgbt also fun fact bulgarian is the ultimate no language

- posted by Luna [Calliope Fork]

Saoirse

@pierogiburo It's wrong for Gàidhlig right from the start: No 'v' in Gàidhlig (or in Irish I'm guessing?)

Adrianna Pińska

@komos @pierogiburo There's no V (or X, or Q) in Polish either, but we do sometimes use those characters (foreign words; brand names; bilingual people being punny). So as a heuristic for identifying text, this works (you can't eliminate a piece of text as definitely not Polish if it has those characters).

Cat McIntyre

@confluency @komos @pierogiburo We don't use v in Gàidhlig though. We replace it with bh in loan words. And I'm confused about why i is listed as being in Gàidhlig but not Irish, as it definitely appears in Irish words. The easy way to distinguish them is accent direction.

Also missing Cornish and Manx, as far as I can see. I can understand wanting to pretend Manx orthography doesn't exist (😜) but Cornish doesn't deserve the omission.

Cat McIntyre

@confluency @komos @pierogiburo Wait, unless the b G R v is just supposed to mean that it's in the Latin alphabet?

Adrianna Pińska

@catmcintyre @komos @pierogiburo No, I think it really is supposed to indicate the presence of those specific letters -- so it looks like a mistake, if you don't ever use them, even in foreign words.

PulkoMandy

@confluency @catmcintyre @komos @pierogiburo I think it is "do you see anything that looks like b G R or v". If you see any one of these (not necessarily all of them), you are looking at something written in latin alphabet. Other letter shapes could have lookalikes in cyrillic, greek, or other scripts, so these specific 4 were chosen

Eleder

@confluency @catmcintyre @komos @pierogiburo I have understood as a reference to "Latin alphabet" too (that'd explain the mix of capital and small letters)

Davey

@komos @pierogiburo is the logic "All" or "Any" though 🤔

SuperDicq

@pierogiburo@tech.lgbt I think "ij" would be better for Dutch since that is very unique too.

ache

@pierogiburo Nice ! I like it.

I don't retoot because of the use of flags to refer to languages but I like the idea.

Meh as a Service

@pierogiburo I like how it just goes "well if it ain't Yiddish it's gotta be Cyrillic!"

Grunge Fox :spinny_neofox:

@pierogiburo This is wrong from the start though. We don't actually use letter "v" in Polish, and yet it's on the left side of the chart... :neofox_confused:

Evvy :neofox_floof:

@grunge_fox it's "if you see any of these letters, then go left"

Grunge Fox :spinny_neofox:

@pierogiburo Ohhh, any of the letters :neofox_googly_shocked:

Les Blazemore

@grunge_fox @pierogiburo I seem to remember the V appearing in Polish for foreign loanwords...but I think it's still pronounced as W

Tykayn

@pierogiburo hey that is no autism at all, reimburse me

Amro

@pierogiburo I am dismayed. 'ieuw' (pronounced like the english 'eew') might be dutch but the 'ui' combination is much more unique to the language.
And not pronounceable for non-native speakers. Try it, I dare you.

(ps. Ui is the dutch word for onion.)

Elenna :verified_transgender:​

@amro @pierogiburo as a non-native, it's so hard to say lol
and of course the Dutch decided that the Dutch word for Germany and Germans would contain it, just to torture us more (to be fair, we deserve it).

Amro

@elexia
Well, the Germans could have decided to go along with us... It's very similar Duitsland = Deutschland 🤷‍♀️

@pierogiburo

DELETED

@pierogiburo@tech.lgbt aww a proper belarusian flag, finally ​:ablobcatheart:​

Margret Kuarell

@pierogiburo

ওহ কত মহান! 🤩

(i know it's not european, but i love all languages 😁)

Kenneth

@pierogiburo
Is that a flow chart

P.S. "OMG it is."

Silkester

@pierogiburo

tiny hick-up in the flowchart.
ü is a yes to German. German uses the Umlaute ä ö ü anywhere from start to finish and the tight combo of sz: ß in the middle and at the end of words, aside from the Anglo-Saxon a-z

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Erik Živković

@pierogiburo at first glance it looks fucked but then you read it properly and you're like "yes"

Roger Mexico

@pierogiburo Am I super autistic if I found an error 😭

Michael van Niekerk 🦀 ☕️ ⚛

@pierogiburo As an Afrikaans speaking person I can't find a place to fit it (Dutch derivative). We no longer have ieuw (replaced by uu). We do have ä, ë, ü also.
Sigh.

Dziadek

@pierogiburo Deep joy! And nice to see the other flavour of autism clicking in with the replies— checking for faults.

a.

@pierogiburo very neat. i would have liked for yidish to be determined by the use of the komets alef אָ which is specific to yiddish and helps differentiate from hebrew

Carlos Solís
Fun to see there's no way of telling Yugoslav/Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin/Blackmountese apart by just the spelling, it's as if they were the exact same freaking language after all
Franchesko

@pierogiburo Upper Sorbian (hornjoserbska) and lower Sorbian (dolnoserbska) are in exactly the wrong spot (should be reversed)💀

Dizzy Ken :confusedlucy:​:rebeccaangry:​

@pierogiburo wow, I'm saving this for later. Gonna try it on some mystery texts. Lots of fun. :kekw:

🚲

@pierogiburo üü could very well be plattdüütsch

The Cat Collective

@pierogiburo This chart lives rent free in our head from how many linguistics deep dive sessions we've been on.

Oh and recently we've started our own linguistics book collection, so....

-Ryan

Michael 🎇
@pierogiburo I wonder what this language is? I thought Ukrainian was unique having the letter ї:
Ї
Northern Solar Punk

@pierogiburo that's wild. But I would prefer the language names all to be written in English. I've no idea what some of the are or how to spell them. Plus I'm really bad at flags.

Paul Evans

@pierogiburo I like that it contains #Esperanto
---
Mi ŝatas ke ĝi enhavas Esperanto

Sandor Kunyik

@pierogiburo Esperanto is an artificial language, similar to Elvish or Klingon, and it’s not ‘European’ at the very least. I don’t see Latin - it’s a dead language, it’s not a ‘mother tongue’ of any European ethnicity, but if Esperanto is valid, Latin should also be valid, because it is European. I also don’t see Romani, often referred to as Gypsy, and other dialects that are languages in their own right.

Brian Hawthorne

@pierogiburo @Julie I need this tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

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