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Comment by lolpython | Hacker News Reader

Really excited to see how this affects the Geoguessr[0] meta. This will be up there with Russia, Brazil, Turkey, USA, and Canada in that it can really make or break competitive games. Since the countries are so large and it can be difficult to tell which region you're in

[0]: https://www.geoguessr.com/

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If in urban areas, the presence of street signs in different languages will help in a multi-lingual country like India. The trees and terrain can also vary quite a bit, from arid to rain-forest.

A bunch of GeoGuessr streamers I watch can't tell the difference between Bangla and Sinhala/Tamil and basically do a 50-50 coin toss when it comes to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. I look forward to them being even more befuddled by all the Devanagari variants.

Really? I feel like these two in written form are pretty different, and I don't have any real knowledge of South Asian languages.

Personally I feel Thai and Lao are harder to tell apart (I've resorted to: Lao is more curvy, Thai uses more straight lines), and also how to tell apart Czech from Slovakian, or Danish from other Nordic languages. Of course there are other ways to tell where you are, and if you only rely on written language you will not become a great player.

I'd watch GeoRainbolt[1] and all the pros that play in his tournaments.

1: https://georainbolt.com/

Yes, it's funny. It ought to be trivial to differentiate between Bangla and Sinhala/Tamil because Bangla has the top horizontal line joining letters of a word whereas Sinhala/Tamil have the round jalebi-like letters. But somehow the streamers always forget about it.

(They're busy commentating, and they're not dedicated GeoGuessr streamers. It's understandable.)

But even if they could, it will still be harder when it comes time to differentiate between Hindi / Gujarati / Marathi / Bangla etc, which is why I'm looking forward to it.

How did you end up telling apart Danish from “other Nordic languages”?

It’s quite trivial as a layman American who has lived in Scandinavia to tell Danish apart for Swedish (one immediate dead giveaway is usage of ø in Danish vs ö in Swedish). But apparently Danish and Norwegian in written form are almost indistinguishable, so reliance on cultural usage of words must be necessary

As a Norwegian, I was going to say wait for the Dane to open their mouth; it's apparent in roughly 1 picosecond.

But yeah this is probably with the written language/static imagery so please ignore, move along. :)

Norwegian has the diphthongs "ei" and "øy", while Danish has "ej" and "øj". Though I don't know whether you can rely on that when looking at proper names (surnames, place names).

in case anyone here is wondering anyway:

Only Czech: ě, ř, ů

Only Slovak: ä, ľ, ô

Bangla, Sinhala and Tamil have distinct scripts. Bangla script is similar to Devanagari script in the sense that you have the topline (overbar a.k.a. Shirorekha, literally headline). Sinhala does not have that.

Tamil is a completely distinct script.

Tamil is used in signs/boards in several southasian countries (Southern state of Tamilnadu and other southern states, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore). Particularly in Sri Lanka, due to its official language status, it is possible to to lead to ambiguity in GeoGuessr between India and Sri Lanka. Contextual clues can generally rule out Malaysia and Singapore. So, I can understand the ambiguity between Sri Lankan Tamil and Tamil used in India at script level, but Bangla and Tamil have such distinct scripts that there are simple heuristics you can use to disambiguate.

Example for visual comparison:

https://translate.google.co.in/?sl=auto&tl=ta&text=I%20love%...

https://translate.google.co.in/?sl=auto&tl=bn&text=I%20love%...

https://translate.google.co.in/?sl=auto&tl=si&text=I%20love%...

Speaking of Geoguessr, I can definitely recommend Geotastic[1] – a free and donor-funded alternative.

[1]: https://geotastic.net

Thanks - I’ve been a longtime GeoGuessr dilettante but I’ll check that out too!

My immediate thought as well. Please tell me they have region-based phone prefixes with an easy to learn arrangement. Brasil has this and it's very helpful. This will change the game for sure. No more "Obviously Bangladesh".

Yeah, this will be interesting. Since I don't really recognize different languages within India, it might take some time to learn them. Previously Bangladesh was really easy to distinguish from other Asian countries from their writing, but many Indian languages look very similar to me.

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