Re: Unknown Language Identifier!

En réponse à Padraic Brown <pbrown@...>:

> Try this out on your conlangs:
>
> http://epsilon3.georgetown.edu/~cball/languageid/
>
Well, here is a strange one: I tried the list of day- and monthnames in Romanian
(I know, it may not be a representative sample of the language, but that's all I
had :) ), and I obtained:

The sample you submitted scored most highly against: Swahili with a score of
0.0116.* (!!!)

The next three highest scoring language references are:

     Inupiaq (score 0.0106).
     Lithuanian (score 0.0101).
     Lithuanian (score 0.0095).

Well, that Romanian monthnames look like Swahili or Inupiaq escapes me :) . But
it seems that the program was a little confused, as it gave two scores for
Lithuanian (at least an IE lang)

I tried the Tshirt submission in Moten, and got:

The sample you submitted scored most highly against: Hungarian with a score of
0.0396.**

The next three highest scoring language references are:

     Inupiaq (score 0.0178).
     BasqueGuipuz (score 0.0141).
     Polish (score 0.0137).

Here I can see the correspondance, especially with Basque (I didn't make Moten
out of Basque, but it's by reading some grammar about Basque that I got the
basic idea that led to Moten :) Jeez, this program looked inside my head :) ).

And then I tried the Tshirt submission in Reman, and got:

The sample you submitted scored most highly against: Sotho with a score of
0.0566.**

The next three highest scoring language references are:

     Catalan (score 0.0319).
     SerboCroatian (score 0.0244).
     SchwytzBern (score 0.0233).

What's SchwytzBern? (it looks like someone got asleep on a keyboard :) ). What I
like is that it puts Catalan only as second match. When I devised Reman, I had a
conscious effort to make it different enough from other Romance langs so that
the link wouldn't be too obvious. But Sotho as a first match! Interestingly, it
seems that this program relates a lot unknown languages to African langs
(Romanian to Swahili and Reman to Sotho :) Are we going to discover a distant
link between African languages and Romance langs? :)) ).

And finally with the Tshirt submission in Narbonósc, I got:

The sample you submitted scored most highly against: Italian with a score of
0.0466.*

The next three highest scoring language references are:

     Galician (score 0.0450).
     Catalan (score 0.0362).
     French (score 0.0332).

All four are Romance langs. Well, Narbonósc cannot deny its family :)) .
Interesting enough, all those four languages have been the first influence on
Narbonósc (though I would have thought French would have done a better score,
and I would have seen Portuguese rather than Galician. Still, the answer is
quite fair in this case).

I'll try again with longer samples to see the difference (I'm wondering what it
would give with Chasmäöcho :)) )

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr