Comments on: McDonald’s language quiz

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:47:55 +0000

A lot of the dipthongs in English are quite tricky to transliterate into Cyrillic too.

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 08:20:57 +0000

I didn’t take the test. The middle line showed up as little boxes in my browser (Opera 7.2) and the introduction reminded me that I have no idea how to distinguish Russian from other Slavic languages. (The line in Cyrillic didn’t make any sense; I hope that wasn’t Russian. It’s been thirty years, but still…) I do want to say that we, the English-speaking peoples, ought to do a better job of transliterating other languages. When Gorbachev became the Soviet premier, I had a strong suspicion that his name was actually Gorbachyof, but I had to hear it on the TV for confirmation. Is it so hard to distinguish e and ë? Likewise, when Kostunica beat Milosevic, I was pleased to find a photo of a Serbian newspaper on Yahoo telling the world that Koshtunitsa had beaten Milosevich. I’d claim that Cyrillic has it all over the Latin alphabet except that it lacks symbols for “th” and “w” (and other sounds, I’m sure).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 01:14:59 +0000

Actually Nicholas, Dan’s tip doesn’t work as you have no doubt seen. What your looking for is to replace the ‘ALT=”?”’ with onmouseover=”window.status=’?’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’‘;”

By: Nicholas Whyte

Nicholas Whyte — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 21:02:01 +0000

Dan – thanks for the tip, I’ve incorporated it. Vanya – more widely used than Cyrillic, certainly; but I think not in Europe. And I describe other languages as exotic too. But I’ve moderated the tone of what’s on the page. Cryptic Ned – thanks, as with Dan I’ve incorporated your suggestion.

By: Cryptic Ned

Cryptic Ned — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 18:58:45 +0000

A quick way to tell whether something is Arabic, Farsi or Urdu: Arabic never has three dots below the line. There are only two characters in Arabic with three dots, and they’re both above the line. Farsi and Urdu have almost identical alphabets (both the ch and p with 3 dots below the line), but Urdu also has a unique diacritical above the line, looking like a lowercase b (or more accurately, the Arabic “T” or emphatic t). This is used to indicate retroflex on t and d. If you don’t see that, it might be either language. I don’t know anything about common vocabulary or spelling rules that would distinguish them.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 18:49:12 +0000

Nichloas – Insert an ALT=”whatever” in the HREF link –

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 18:34:38 +0000

I cheated on two of the slavic languages and one of the baltic ones. Otherwise, no problem.

By: Vanya

Vanya — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 17:43:27 +0000

Embarrassed to say I confused the Croatian with Serbian and the Macedonian with Bulgarian, otherwise it’s great fun. I was a little offended he called Arabic “an exotic alphabet”, it’s more widely used than Cyrillic.

By: Nicholas Whyte

Nicholas Whyte — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:55:00 +0000

Hey, glad you enjoyed it, folks! And if anyone can advise me how to prevent the next link from appearing in the status bar, I’d appreciate the help…

By: Cryptic Ned

Cryptic Ned — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:13:23 +0000

That’s cool! I got them all except for Croatian (guessed Czech and Slovenian first; if the passage included the d with a line through it, I would have got it), and Macedonian and Bulgarian (guessed Belarusan for both). Lucky guess to say Danish at first instead of Norwegian; can anyone point me to any telltale differences between these languages? I like to be able to recognize things.

By: Cryptic Ned

Cryptic Ned — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:13:15 +0000

By: language hat

language hat — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 15:53:00 +0000

This is fantastic! I screwed up the Scandahoovian languages first time through, so I learned something. (To compensate, I got the Georgian right even though I couldn’t see the letters!)

By: KCinDC

KCinDC — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 14:46:13 +0000

I know our strange American names are hard for you furriners, but it’s McDonald’s, not Macdonald’s. [Sorry – fixed this. CB]

By: Sander

Sander — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 14:39:54 +0000

I got most of them right (had trouble with discerning the slavic languages), but after a while I found out that the statusbar shows the link to either ‘wrong.html’, ‘wronga.html’ or ‘long.html’.