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Comment by techaqua | Hacker News Reader

What about farsi and other languages that use arabic script but not arabic at all? I can write (with effort lol) indonesian or javanese in arabic script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_script.

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Farsi has the letter "p" which Arabic does not. That letter has three dots on top (sometimes drawn like ^. I think there may be another. Arabic only has the "sh" sound with the three dots.

Trying to read Farsi, it feels like I should know what's going on but am left with the feeling that I've forgotten all my Arabic. Then I'll see some of the bonus letters.

> Trying to read Farsi

Wait till you discover Urdu, which confuses Farsi speakers even more. For extra fun try the Nastaliq script.

> Trying to read Farsi, it feels like I should know what's going on but am left with the feeling that I've forgotten all my Arabic

This is what Dutch sounds like to me as an English speaker - plenty of common sounds with English; it has a similar speed, rhythm, intonation to English. It feels like I’m hearing English but have lost my faculties to parse it

Yes! It’s kinda like “hearing voices’. It sounds like English, but if you try and ‘tune in’ you can’t!

As word games, I like sentences which sound valid in multiple languages, regardless of if the meaning is changed.

"Goedemorgen, ik hoop dat je bent goed".

Always fun are sentences that sound very similar and are entirely correct in both languages but mean something completely different, like:

He was in the war -- Hij was in de war (he was confused)

A stiff in the brook -- Een stijve in de broek (a boner in the pants)

Those are the two most famous examples I'm familiar with, but I'm sure there are a lot more.

An ex had the smaller example of incorrectly asking for "un préservatif" when she meant "un préserve".

One of her friends was half of a multi-nationality couple, I think it was French and Irish, and the punchline was their kid, at a beach, yelling, in a strong Irish accent "Look mummy! Phoques!"

If by "un préserve" they meant a preserve/marmalade then in French that's "une confiture" (or "marmelade" but it's less somewhat rare). I don't think "un préserve" is a word...

Although I may be misremembering the exact word as I have a GCSE grade D from 23 years ago, her French is much better than mine as she lived in Paris for a few years.

It was certainly something close to what I wrote.

Oh wow, I've encountered a lot of words in English/Czech that are "false friends" but it's too far away gramatically to construct similar sounding entire sentences. That's brilliant you can do it with English and Dutch :)

Also I wonder if there's a connection between trousers being "broek" in Dutch and "breeks" in Scots.

edit: wow ok I should've just went to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeks

At a NATO spy convention, an English spy asks their Estonian, French, Spanish, German, and Bulgarian counterparts if they can see them in the new camouflage they are testing.

"Jah" "Oui" "Sí" "Ja" "Da"

I know some Spanish and hearing Portuguese does this to me every time; it's like I've almost tuned in but there's nothing there.

I'm Spanish and I get that feeling with Romanian. It sounds somewhat familiar, but I have no idea what is going on.

Portuguese and Italian on the other hand are much closer, and if spoken slowly enough, somewhat understandable.

There are four letters in Farsi that do not exist in Arabic - (گ ژ چ پ), which make the 'p', 'ch', 'zh' and 'g' sounds, respectively. But the underlying calligraphic system (RTL order, joining forms, harakat diacritics, and so on) is pretty much the same across the Arabic script and its descendants.

The same issue also exists in Latin script, where German has the ß, not to mention various umlauts, strikes, circles and cedilles modifying letters of the otherwise standard Latin script.

I'd imagine it's more like seeing Vietnamese as a European: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet

If you live in Europe and speak a language using a Latin script, you probably have come across most of the extensions other European languages add to the shared base in loanwords or foreign media. But then you look at something like Vietnamese and you are no longer sure how letters work.

"p" has three dots beneath it (پ), three dots on top is "s" (ث).

Thanks, thought it was 3 dots on the Arabic "b". It really doesn't take long until you Farsi tries to sneak in some extra letters to figure out it's not Arabic.

Looking back on it, I remember feeling like I can't remember Arabic, but part of it is that this also happens during that time when I'm getting used to the script. There is always an adjustment period with every new font/handwriting that takes a sentence or two to sort out the style before I truly start reading.

Point 3 mentioned that:

3. The text is in the wrong Arabic-script language, for example Farsi in Egypt (Egyptians primarily speak an Egyptian Dialect of Arabic), or Modern Standard Arabic in Afghanistan (Afghans speak Dari, an Afghan Persian language). Comme l'alphabet latin, vous pouvez écrire différentes langues avec l'alphabet arabe.

That's actually what I expected the website to do: Is this Arabic vs. Farsi, etc?

this applies to those languages as well

And also Aramaic dialects like Syriac

Syriac script looks completely different to Arabic but has the same issues when rendered

Mostly yes, and I think the OP is well-written.

But note that in some cases, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajik_alphabet#Samples point number 2 won't be accurate. I'm not the best reader of Tajik written in (Perso-)Arabic script, but I don't believe "ال" appears in the samples there. (It does appear in the word "ALphabet" in the opening paragraph!)

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