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Linguaholic

Recognizing Foreign Language Scripts without Knowing Them


SpringBreeze

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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