September 08, 2004

McDonald's language quiz

Posted by Chris

This is fun: a quiz based on McDonald’s Happy Meal game instructions . Can you recognize the languages? (Via Des von Bladet ).

Posted on September 8, 2004 12:45 PM UTC
Comments

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’.

Posted by Sander · September 8, 2004 02:39 PM

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

[Sorry - fixed this. CB]

Posted by KCinDC · September 8, 2004 02:46 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!)

Posted by language hat · September 8, 2004 03:53 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.

Posted by Cryptic Ned · September 8, 2004 04:13 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.

Posted by Cryptic Ned · September 8, 2004 04:13 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…

Posted by Nicholas Whyte · September 8, 2004 04:55 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.

Posted by Vanya · September 8, 2004 05:43 PM

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

Posted by Scott Martens · September 8, 2004 06:34 PM

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

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

Posted by Dan · September 8, 2004 06:49 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.

Posted by Cryptic Ned · September 8, 2004 06:58 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.

Posted by Nicholas Whyte · September 8, 2004 09:02 PM

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=”;”

Posted by Anonymous · September 9, 2004 01:14 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).

Posted by bad Jim · September 9, 2004 08:20 AM

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

Posted by Richard · September 9, 2004 11:47 AM
Followups

→ THE LANGUAGES OF MCDONALDS..
Excerpt: This is the most fun I've had in ages. Nicholas Whyte explains:This set of pages was inspired by a visit to McDonald's in May 2004. Along with our son's Happy Meal, we got a small playstation-type game where you have...Read more at languagehat.com

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.