Recognizing Foreign Language Scripts without Knowing Them

[SpringBreeze]

Qamra started a thread called: "Recognizing languages without knowing them". I thought the topics was interesting since I never really paid attention that I was actually doing that. I mean I knew I was doing it. But I never acknowledged that I was doing it. And while I was commenting on Qamra's thread, I realized I also can recognize a couple foreign, non-Latin alphabet scripts without having ever studied them -- Russian and Arabic.

What about you?

[justusforus]

I recognize Russian characters as they are so distinctive.  The first time I saw them I knew I would not forget them since I remember thinking some looked backward.  I too also recognize Arabic as you mentioned and also Chinese.

[thekernel]

I can tell general language families from each other, but when it comes to differing between Japanese and Cantonese, or Russian and Ukrainian, I get pretty lost. I'm decent at identifying romance languages although Portuguese can frequently be confused for Spanish.

[Czarownica]

I can recognize Arabic, cyrillic script (I can't tell which language those words are in, though), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indian languages, Greek... I think that's pretty much it.

[Daedalus]

I can recognise various scripts, but only because I've seen them before, so in that sense I do 'know' them. I do not understand them though.

Arabic, Cyrillic, Japanese (especially Katakana), Korean, Egyptian hieroglyphs I think are usually easy to recognise; Chinese and Thai I've seen and might recognise, but can't really think of any particular character features now that for me makes the script. And then of course there's things like the Voynich manuscript which is fairly unique and recognisable.

[SpringBreeze]

Interestingly enough, I've seen Korean, Chinese and Japanese scripts before. I've actually seen them several times and have even watched movies and music videos from these countries. And yet I can't recognize them. But I can at least say what region they come from.