p.s. I'm saying this because most of these terms that has a dial-map are common in daily conversation. The differences in written Chinese vocabulary aren't as significant; how scientific and technical terms are expressed is largely determined by your administrative region.
Ukrainian and russian words often use the same letters but are pronounced very differently due to distinct phonetics. On the other hand, some Polish and Czech words sound the same or very similar to Ukrainian but look quite different because of their different alphabets. Therefore, phonetic transcription would be a valuable improvement.
I've been using phonetic transcriptions in a parallel text reader application I've been putting together. It seems like they go a long way in allowing a foreign language learner to internalize a word's pronunciation.
The Finnish example translation is wrong: "an example" should be "esimerkki". (There are no articles in Finnish.) The map shows "esimerkiksi" which means "for example". (Prepositions are relatively rare in Finnish.)
Edit: Ah, it says the data is from Google translator. So no suprise here, Google translator produces poor results. It's said that Deepl is much better. I can't really tell because I don't need machine translation Finnish English. Both are roughly equally strong foreign languages for me.
When translating between two languages with gendered nouns, it will also lose the correct gender in translation, since it goes through the intermediate step of English. It’s hilarious how inadequate it is.
DeepL is leagues better than Google Translate, and I can tell because I've worked with a lot of translation to and from Finnish. They are not even comparable. Google Translate will completely garble any translation to or from Finnish. Kagi Translate also does a great job in Finnish translation.
I can mostly speak for German. It seems to mix them all into one general language. But there are a lot of local differences between north and south of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. And it’s not just dialect, but really different words that might not be understood everywhere.
If you look at the english part it has at least three different words. Similar in Spanish.
- Swiss German and Austrian German didn't make the cut because Switzerland and Austria are on good terms with Germany and don't mind if we call their languages a dialect of German. Not only is that justification to exclude them, they are also not in Google translate for this reason (which this map uses)
- Luxembourg did mind and went to great lengths to get their German dialect recognized as a separate language, is in Google translate, but Wikipedia lists them as only 300k speakers
- Frisian is seen as a distinct language because of how different it is, is in Google translate, but has about 200k speakers
- Similarly, Scottish Garlic is in Google translate has only 70k-200k speakers
The map is consistent if you set the goal of only considering languages that are in Google translate and have at least 500k speakers.
I do think these rules detract from the map. Frisian and Luxembourgish are interesting as "in-between" languages (Luxemburgish has a lot of French influence, Frisian is closer related to English). And Swiss German has many distinct words that are very different from their German counterparts, so for the purposes of this map it really should be a language.
IIUC, the Swiss German can't make a cut as there's no standard written form (and with it, not much resources), and the variations between the cities are pretty significant.
It’s hilarious that an English language website has so many enthusiasts for the regional differences of their favourite foreign languages while all pretending that English is monolithic and consistent everywhere. Try driving around the north of England for an hour or two and see how many different words for bread roll you encounter. Baps, barm cakes, oven bottom muffins…
> And it’s not just dialect, but really different words that might not be understood everywhere. If you look at the english part it has at least three different words. Similar in Spanish.
I think you cannot really compare the minuscule differences between "Standard German", "Austrian Standard German", and "Swiss Standard German" to the differences between English, Irish and Welsh, which are not even from the same language family. Also, the tool is based on Google Translate, and AFAIK Google Translate doesn't differentiate between them.
Comparing the tool to this map [0], it seems to do a pretty good job in capturing all major languages in Europe, while ignoring their dialects.
But I agree that I would be great if you could zoom into the map and also show differences in local dialects. ChatGPT seems to be pretty good at translating to different variants of standard German, or German dialects [1]
Same for Belgium, Google/Apple translate has never been able to correctly translate French and Dutch for us while our vocabulary choices are drastically different from neighbouring France and Netherlands.
For people with their iDevice set to the Swiss/Austrian German or Belgian Dutch locales, Apple Translate initially didn't even offer their languages in Apple Translate (i.e. not even German or Dutch). Only after internal complaining did they allow Swiss/Austrian German users to use German in Apple Translate.
One-to-one word translation doesn’t make too much sense, because words tend to have more than one meaning, and they don’t map 1:1 between languages, both in meaning and usage. For example, “nice” is translated here into words that would (depending on language and context) more commonly translate back to “beautiful”, “pleasant”, “good”, or “fun”. They aren’t necessarily wrong as translations, but the website’s premise of “word A in language X is equivalent to word B in language Y” is.
You immediately see the difference (or similarly) of languages when using words that are very old, such as "iron", or "stone", which are words that have existed from the origins of that language.
Arabic: mama babi. Mandarin: mama baba. Swahili: mama baba. Inuktitut: anaana ataata. English: mama papa. Tamil: amma appa.
These languages are not known to be related.
The first vowel sound a child makes is approximately "a" and the first consonant they form tends to be a nasal plosive "mba mba mba" and the second distinct sound tends to be a dental or labial plosive "pa ta pa ta". And the first thing a baby says is "mommy" of course and the second thing a baby says is "daddy" of course. So mama is mommy and papa or tata is daddy. That's the usual explanation, anyway.
my favorite example of trade routes influenced the spread of a word is "tea". the word for “tea” comes from either a variation of “cha” or a variation of “te,” reflecting distinct dialect pronunciations in China.
countries receiving tea overland (e.g., via the Silk Road) adopted forms of “cha,” while those trading by sea through Fujian ports adopted forms of “te.”
Not doubting about this but then, how come that Portuguese uses the "chai" version, being on the extreme west of Europe, and with all the other countries in between Portugal and the end of the Silk Road using "te"? Not to mention the fact that Portuguese were a naval power for many years, with colonies in Asia as well.
Good question, Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used.
The term cha (茶) is “Sinitic,” meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese dialects. Meanwhile, the word tea comes from the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal Fujian province, where the character 茶 is pronounced te.
Russia got it from Mongolia, so it uses the “chai” variation. Move just a tiny bit West though and Poland got it from France, which got it via sea routes, therefore Poland uses the “te” variation, even though a lot of the culture of drinking tea in Poland has been influenced by Russia, with boiled tea being a thing in more eastern parts, and variations on that with citruses and honey being very popular (even becoming more popular today). Curiously, contrary to the word for tea, Polish word for kettle borrows from Russian influence – “czajnik”, where the first syllable comes obviously from “chai”.
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p.s. I'm saying this because most of these terms that has a dial-map are common in daily conversation. The differences in written Chinese vocabulary aren't as significant; how scientific and technical terms are expressed is largely determined by your administrative region.
Edit: Ah, it says the data is from Google translator. So no suprise here, Google translator produces poor results. It's said that Deepl is much better. I can't really tell because I don't need machine translation Finnish English. Both are roughly equally strong foreign languages for me.
- Swiss German and Austrian German didn't make the cut because Switzerland and Austria are on good terms with Germany and don't mind if we call their languages a dialect of German. Not only is that justification to exclude them, they are also not in Google translate for this reason (which this map uses)
- Luxembourg did mind and went to great lengths to get their German dialect recognized as a separate language, is in Google translate, but Wikipedia lists them as only 300k speakers
- Frisian is seen as a distinct language because of how different it is, is in Google translate, but has about 200k speakers
- Similarly, Scottish Garlic is in Google translate has only 70k-200k speakers
The map is consistent if you set the goal of only considering languages that are in Google translate and have at least 500k speakers.
I do think these rules detract from the map. Frisian and Luxembourgish are interesting as "in-between" languages (Luxemburgish has a lot of French influence, Frisian is closer related to English). And Swiss German has many distinct words that are very different from their German counterparts, so for the purposes of this map it really should be a language.
I think you cannot really compare the minuscule differences between "Standard German", "Austrian Standard German", and "Swiss Standard German" to the differences between English, Irish and Welsh, which are not even from the same language family. Also, the tool is based on Google Translate, and AFAIK Google Translate doesn't differentiate between them.
Comparing the tool to this map [0], it seems to do a pretty good job in capturing all major languages in Europe, while ignoring their dialects.
But I agree that I would be great if you could zoom into the map and also show differences in local dialects. ChatGPT seems to be pretty good at translating to different variants of standard German, or German dialects [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#/media/Fil...
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67bba4db-9458-800c-b5f8-fd3fa196d4...
For example in Rome a grocery store bag is "busta", but in Milan it is "sachetto" with "busta" being the word they use for an envelope.
https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-7/f01f/
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For instance "cow" and "Kuh" come from the same word as "boeuf" and "buey" (also despite the gender difference).
one can follow migrations.. and criss-crosses..
btw, "orange" as color in Bulgarian is still "orange" (оранжев/а/о/и), but "orange" as fruit is портокал ("portokal") - so that's tricky..
"oranges" seems more correct, vs "orange color" maybe
Arabic: mama babi. Mandarin: mama baba. Swahili: mama baba. Inuktitut: anaana ataata. English: mama papa. Tamil: amma appa.
These languages are not known to be related.
The first vowel sound a child makes is approximately "a" and the first consonant they form tends to be a nasal plosive "mba mba mba" and the second distinct sound tends to be a dental or labial plosive "pa ta pa ta". And the first thing a baby says is "mommy" of course and the second thing a baby says is "daddy" of course. So mama is mommy and papa or tata is daddy. That's the usual explanation, anyway.
Here some other words as well: https://www.kleinersprachatlas.ch/karte-1-butter
It's from https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Apfelbutzen
countries receiving tea overland (e.g., via the Silk Road) adopted forms of “cha,” while those trading by sea through Fujian ports adopted forms of “te.”
The project visualise perfectly this distinction.
The term cha (茶) is “Sinitic,” meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese dialects. Meanwhile, the word tea comes from the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal Fujian province, where the character 茶 is pronounced te.