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From: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Horrible Hack to tell Scand. Languages apart
Message-ID: <841@mcvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 13-Oct-85 14:28:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: mcvax.841
Posted: Sun Oct 13 14:28:43 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 15-Oct-85 05:07:50 EDT
References: <518@tjalk.UUCP>
Reply-To: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 29

In article <518@tjalk.UUCP> dick@tjalk.UUCP (Dick Grune) writes:
>
>Between Danish and Norwegian: the languages are highly related.
>Hack 2: If words often contain VOICED consonants (b, d, g, v),
>	especially between two vowels or at the end of words, it's
>	Danish. This makes Fodseng Danish and Fotseng Norwegian.
>	(likewise bog/bok,book;  tage/ta, take;  inn/ind, in; and
>	many others)  The word av (of) is a dead give-away: it is
>	Danish, the Norwegian form being af.  The letter combination
>	ck is another: it occurs only in Danish and is written kk in
>	Norwegian (tack/takk, thanks)
Well, I agree with the b,d,g part, but the remainder must be a
misunderstanding.
The word  av  is Norwegian, the Danish being  af .
Thanks is  tak  in Danish; the ck is often an indication of Swedish.
About the d in Danish words like  ind , that is quite another matter;
it is not pronounced at all. [Or, more precisely, the d in words ending
in -nd or -ld tend to indicate a glottal stop. In a few cases the
tendency arises to pronounce according to spelling (as in English
debt, lamb, comb) - I have heard fodbold (football) pronounced with a
dental at the end.]

>I could give you hack 6-10 to distinguish between, Finnish Estonian
>Hungarian and Turkish, but I haven't been provoked (yet).
>
I would like to see them - consider yourself provoked.

What about a little program that automatically recognizes the language
given a few sentences?