Guess The Language!!!

[Adarain]

I'm going to guess spoken in Latin America outside Brazil?

[opipik]

Spoken in Mexico?

[qwed117]

Eastern Hemisphere? (And if so, is it Rohingya? The final enye is very weird)

[zyma]

It's my turn
Zapandú me ziña yáa. Gudindeca pur tu jma rindá naxhi.

Well I'll say that's Zapotec because you made it too easy to cheat on this one, uh, I mean, I happen to have read the exact book you took it from. My turn then, I guess.

There we go.

Xiok ngo wition tempran | Munajta naw mujimbiuf tim | Aj ka kuchil ka ngo majior uxing | Xinan tambasan miausun an najaun kuñ dyajlaik

Is it spoken in Central America?

[Avo]

Yes to all, except the Eastern Hemisphere one. It's spoken in Mexico.

[opipik]

Uto-Aztecan?

[qwed117]

Is it spoken to the north of Mexico city?

[Avo]

Not Uto-Aztecan and not spoken north of Mexico City

[Birdlang]

Does ñ nasalize vowels? Also, is it Mayan?

[qwed117]

Is it a language isolate?

[Avo]

It's a language isolate and <ñ> doesn't stand for nasalization.

[Birdlang]

Purhépecha?

[Adarain]

Is the language alive?

Edit: I’m guessing Cuitlatec. Been looking through lists of language isolates, and this one looks the most promising (but still a shitty guess…)

[sangi39]

Since we were talking about "don't google the sample text" one page back, I thought I'd post something again from 2013 concerning the "rules" (which in all fairness, I don't think, have never been officially stated). Acceptable methods of determining what the language the sample text is from appear to be:

1) Process of Elimination: Basically what it says on the tin, pinning the location in which the language is spoken or the family the language belongs to (or both) until you guess the correct answer.

2) Feature Finding: You start out by finding the most characteristic features of the sample, e.g. which diacritics are used, what phonemes are presented, etc. You then search each feature individually (e.g. in Wikipedia, WALS, etc.) and compare the list of languages with those features for languages appearing on all the lists.

3) Actually knowing the language already: It's a rare method (since not everyone playing can know all the languages in the world), but it does turn up. It's the one that's least likely to distinguish from just doing a Google search of the sample text and getting the answer in five seconds, but languages which are easily recognised by one member are usually those with a number of offline sources (JSTOR, access to a large library, etc.).

Where I've used the second method, I usually try to present the path I've used to reach my answer. That way, if anyone objects, the game can start again, but since it involved more work than googling it (see here) it doesn't look like many people have had a problem with it before.

The "rules" might not be perfect but we all seem to agree that googling the sample text and pulling out an answer is not the way to go about things.

[zyma]

Thanks for the summation, sangi39! I think that pretty much covers what I would have personally been able to come up with if asked to list the rules, and more.

(Yeah, it's a shame loftyD is hardly ever on anymore, for a number of reasons, in my opinion, but for this thread, it's most relevant that they could edit a list of rules into the OP so they're clearer to all players.)

[sangi39]

Thanks for the summation, sangi39! I think that pretty much covers what I would have personally been able to come up with if asked to list the rules, and more.

(Yeah, it's a shame loftyD is hardly ever on anymore, for a number of reasons, in my opinion, but for this thread, it's most relevant that they could edit a list of rules into the OP so they're clearer to all players.)

Annoyingly, I can't remember a lot of the old board, but I'm not sure we ever properly had a set of rules back then either beyond "1) post sample, 1b) not a conlang, 2) guess, 2b) without using Google". A clearer set of rules would be nice in the OP, but for the most part this thread seems to be quite happy self-monitoring, and happily it seems most people don't use Google

I'm not sure if everyone would agree with "feature finding", though. I usually leave that up to users in the thread at the time to decide.

[Avo]

It's neither Purepecha nor Cuitlatec.

[qwed117]

Huave? If it hasn't already been asked

[Avo]

Ding ding It's Huave

[Adarain]

I wonder how exactly I managed to miss that. Looking at Huave now, it seems so obvious…