quv ghajbe' tlhInganqoqvam!

[pne]

In our company's Yellow Pages, it's possible to list not only your areas of experience or your hobbies, but also what languages you speak.

The list of possible languages to choose from is pretty interesting; I wonder where they got the list from! It even includes Esperanto, Lojban, and Interlingua, for example. At first I thought it might be all languages that have an ISO 639 code, but there are also more minor conlangs such as Talossan and Ceqli, which I'm fairly sure don't have such a code. So I wonder how the person who made the list had heard of them.

At any rate, a coworker told me that there were two employees who listed "Klingon" as one of the languages they speak! I sent them an email asking them whether this was true and whether they were planning on going to the German qepHom in November.

One of them has already replied—and he said that it had just been a test to see whether anyone would notice. Hah! He has no honour, this one! Pretending to speak Klingon when he really can't!

Edit: and the other one doesn't speak it, either! Hab SoSchaj Quch!

Comments

[timwi.livejournal.com]

Klingon should be pretty easy to recognise statistically. Of all languages I know it has the most Q's, for instance.

Kind of weird, though, that this Language Guesser has Klingon but not Esperanto. I put in "Mi parolas la lingvon internacian." and it said "Spanish" :-p

Identifying Klingon text

[pne.livejournal.com]

The weird capitalisation also gives it away (if you discount peOplE whO tYpE liKe Dis) -- seeing an I or an H in the middle of an otherwise-lowercase word, for example, is probably a pretty sure sign of Klingon.

Re: Identifying Klingon text

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that the capitalization is what matters in this case: copying the text after lowercasing it still gets the Klingon from the guessing tool.

I'd say that Klingon is probably relatively different from most other languages statistically: It just *looks* different.

Re: Identifying Klingon text

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

> I'd say that Klingon is probably relatively different from most other languages

Apparently, the closest language to Klingon is Welsh... not sure who came up with that or how, but there you go...

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I'd have guessed Spanish too, and I took 5 years of it, so I can't expect the machine to be much better than me. :)

I don't really know where the list comes from (you can see it in faded red text on the right side), but you're right that it doesn't include Esperanto. Not that it's perfect anyway - it's only statistical analysis :)

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Heh, I typed in mc'vrtneli gvbrdγvnis "the trainer is plucking us" - possibly the most stereotypically Georgian phrase in the whole world (check out the initial consonant clusters) - and the guesser claimed it was gibberish. I can't think why. :)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Did you type it in the Georgian alphabet? It did say to enter UTF-8 encoded text!

I wouldn't expect it to recognise English in katakana transcription, either...

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't expect it to recognise English in katakana transcription, either...

True...

...but that's cheating then, since Georgian is the only major language written with the Georgian alphabet. :P

[pne.livejournal.com]

*shrug* Same with Greek, Armenian, and most of the languages of the Indian subcontinent.