World Language General Knowledge #2

Same here!

Here here!

Yea both these quizzes are really top drawer :)

100% :)

Great quiz! I really enjoyed this one!

This is a fun quiz. Not too hard not too easy. I'm a bit perplexed that more people know Arabic is an official language of Israel than Hebrew.

My guess is that they know but can't recall the name - Jewish? Israeli? Ivrit? Yiddish?

Some people might also guess Arabic as the official language of Pakistan and get the Israel question by mistake.

They might guess arabic for the byzantine empire too. I know I guessed persian, so arabic wouldn't be much worse.

Great quiz! Can you please accept more spellings for 'thank you' in Italian? I tried every phonetic combination I could think of but still didn't get it. Wah me. Grazie!

እንግሊዝኛ ተናጋሪ? ጥሩ!

Gràcies per la bona prova! Només el 80 per cent de les persones sap que el català és la llengua de Barcelona i de tota Catalunya? Això no és suficient...

Tried several spellings for Italian thank you. Do we really need the silent e at the end?

it's barely a sound, though. Just a schwa. Italians add the same sound to the end of English words that don't have any "e" on the end of them all the time, so it just sounds like an accent.

Maybe that's how you hear it. But trust me, it's a schwa. I've listened to multiple different example.

And actually here they don't pronounce it at all. /ˈɡrat.tsje/
Listen to that. Is it correct? There's only one vowel sound at the end of that word. And it's equivalent to an English long "a" sound as in the American pronunciation of "cake." (or "bed", in an Afrikaans accent, which sound bizarre to an American) Preceding this there is a "y" (j) sound. So... In Italian is the letter "i" used to represent the sound "y" and the letter "e" used to represent the sound "a" or "e"....? I assumed the "i" represented the vowel sound I was hearing at the end of the word, the "e" represented a schwa, and the "y" sound was simply a product of accent or placement of adjacent phonemes.

("y" or "j" sound in this context is not a vowel sound it is palatal approximant- a type of consonant)

So what if he's Italian? Does he have a degree studying linguistics? A lot of Americans would insist that the consonant flap /ɾ/ in "water" is the same sound as the retroflex stop /t/ in "deter" the way that they pronounce it, but that doesn't mean that they know what they're talking about. Everything that most people know about letters and sounds they learned in Kindergarten.

and I'm asking for clarification above.

@Kal - < tzi > = /tsj/ (the syllabic onset), < e > = /e/ (this is not a schwa). < tzi > is not pronounceable on its own as /tsj/ must have a coda to follow it, in the same way that the < tw > as in < twang > cannot appear at the end of a word in English as /tw/ is not permissible as a coda. So, yes, the < i > in Italian represents /j/ in this context, but it can be /i/ in others - < italia > = /italja/. (/j/, by the way, is just consonantal /i/ - try sustaining a /j/.) Italian doesn't reeaally have schwa, and the orthography is such that every letter (or combination of letters) does more or less represent a contrastive speech sound in a systematic way, unlike English. The /t/ in 'deter' is also not retroflex.

Thank you for trying to answer Robbie. I'm not familiar with Italian spelling convention so if the "i" doesn't represent the vowel sound, that's where my confusion stemmed from. I've also heard many different accents of Italian pronunciation now trying to get to the bottom of this, some (with rough English phonetic transcription) say it in a way I would write as "gratzi," others as "gratzie" (with the "e" very definitely a schwa), others "gratzyae" or "gratzyay" or "gratzya" or "gratzye". I found many speaking samples that sound different from one another.
It's been a long time since I took phonology but the stop in deter, time, etc in English is either retroflex or alveolar depending on dialect and accent, is it not? Anyway it's not the same sound as the flap in American English "water," even though the sound is represented by the same letter in written English, and most English speakers wouldn't know this without being told to pay attention. That was the point.

Once again, the only one I missed is one I thought I had already typed. Silly brain syndrome at work.

More language quizzes please!

Pretty sure English remains an official language of Pakistan, although the Constitution specifies that steps should be taken to transition to Urdu-only. http://www.pakistani.org/pakistan/constitution/part12.ch4.html

The most common language in Singapore is English, not Chinese. Chinese languages might have slightly more native speakers than English but English is more or less the common tongue of Singapore, spoken by most people.

100%!!! YES!

The Singapore question threw me off. Thought it was by raw number of speakers, so tried Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.

As a Singaporean, I find it quite hard to believe that Chinese is more commonly spoken than English...as a first language, maybe, but not if you look at the total number of speakers. Data from Ethnologue seems to support this (Chinese wins for first language speakers, but English wins overall), though this article says that English is more commonly spoken at home too.

'Hindi' sounds like 'Urdu'................ yeah right.

https://www.jetpunk.com/user-quizzes/254093/countries-that-have-sent-a-sattelite-to-space

I think that Italian is an official language of Slovenia too.

I read in the Ethiopian constitution that Amharic is a working language instead of an official language.

Arabic is no longer an official language of Israel.