McDonald’s language quiz

by Chris Bertram on September 8, 2004

This is fun: a “quiz based on McDonald’s Happy Meal game instructions”:http://explorers.whyte.com/34l/default.htm . Can you recognize the languages? (Via “Des von Bladet”:http://piginawig.diaryland.com/index.html ).

{ 14 comments }

1

Sander 09.08.04 at 2:39 pm

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’.

2

KCinDC 09.08.04 at 2:46 pm

I know our strange American names are hard for you furriners, but it’s McDonald’s, not Macdonald’s.

[Sorry – fixed this. CB]

3

language hat 09.08.04 at 3:53 pm

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!)

4

Cryptic Ned 09.08.04 at 4:13 pm

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.

5

Cryptic Ned 09.08.04 at 4:13 pm

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.

6

Nicholas Whyte 09.08.04 at 4:55 pm

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…

7

Vanya 09.08.04 at 5:43 pm

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.

8

Scott Martens 09.08.04 at 6:34 pm

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

9

Dan 09.08.04 at 6:49 pm

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

<A HREF=”wrong.html” ALT=”Click Here”>

10

Cryptic Ned 09.08.04 at 6:58 pm

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.

11

Nicholas Whyte 09.08.04 at 9:02 pm

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.

12

Anonymous 09.09.04 at 1:14 am

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=”;”

13

bad Jim 09.09.04 at 8:20 am

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).

14

Richard 09.09.04 at 11:47 am

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

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