Silly Meme on languages

[maeve66]

But I prefer it to the personality quiz that is making the rounds. On that quiz, I basically score as hella balanced and BORING. Bo-ring. I've suppressed the hideous image that goes with this quiz, if that worked right. I hate tables in html.

Language Scholar You scored a 310 out of 400 on language knowledge.

Outstanding! You've scored higher than even most Anthropology students would. You are probably a Linguistics or Anthropology Professor yourself (or at least a Grad student). You may even speak several languages and are possibly working on a new one. If not, then you just have an endless drive to learn about the different cultures of our world. Regardless, you are one of the gems of any society, always promoting a deeper understanding amongst all people. Unless you cheated of course.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 85% on knowledge

Link: The World Languages Test written by jeremie096 on OkCupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Comments

[skwashy.livejournal.com]

I got a hideous score. It was HARD.

Um...did they show the correct answers?

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I didn't look. Hm. I'd be interested to see what I got wrong. I do hella well on tests in general, though, and I like language an awful, awful, awful lot.

I was just reading your most recent entry. I know what you mean about wanting some wee soft cuddly reading. And I love On the Banks of Plum Creek. I own the whole series in the new Serious Softback with Color Illustrations set. They're great. I started reading Little House in the Big Woods to my niece, who at five and a half is still a BIT young for it. But she loves incorporating the story lines into our play with Sunshine Family dolls, anyway.

[ladyjaye75.livejournal.com]

I did a mere 200... "you scored about what would be expected for someone who has not studied a cultural or linguistic science" Hmm, I'm a translator... and yes, this WAS a tough quiz. Oh, and the native language most commonly spoken in Quebec is Inukitut.

[mudpriestess.livejournal.com]

I got a 240, "Language Savvy"... but I did score higher than 99 percent of people my age and gender, so I still have some tattered claim to intelligence. anyway, I bow before your stunning number of correct answers.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

I hate tables in html.

Dude! Unacceptable!

[slit.livejournal.com]

That was fun. But hard. I think I knew more of the African questions than the minority European ones.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Good, then I got that one. Excellent.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why my raw score is pretty high, but my scored higher than thing is so low at 85%. Except... maybe it's that thing that's always happening, which is that there AREN'T any forty year old women on teh intarwebs. Or damn few. And apparently they're all linguists.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Why unacceptable? They're heinous! I need a fucking class in html. Whatever I taught myself eighteen years ago has worn off, and I never paid any attention to tables anyway. But I do hate them. I'm always guessing at the numbers and not understanding the spacing and when adjusting those of other people, seeing all this redundant CRAP.

[commandercranky.livejournal.com]

Yes, very hard. I scored 300, which was an utter surprise, since I was putting out a lot of informed guesses.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

The quiz really underserved semitic languages, don't you think? But I agree, it WAS fun. I'm all surrounded by Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and Pashto these days. Not in teaching, but in my social life. Stranger yet, the people involved with these languages are not native speakers, which is the only way I used to encounter them, in college. Well. I've NEVER encountered Pashto before. I want to learn Arabic and/or Farsi. The alphabet makes me quail, though.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Informed guesses are exactly where it's at, I think. So much of this kind of thing is being good at testing in general.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

Well, other people's may be crap, sure. But tables are the bomb! cellpadding=4 cellspacing=0 and you're ready to rock.

Ok, admittedly all my web pages look like they were written 10 years ago, but it sure beats learning CSS (especially since CSS users still seem to fall back on tables for some layout issues).

[nothings.livejournal.com]

Here's an example of CSS suckage: my first post in this thread, I put your text in a "blockquote". But apparently the CSS styled that entirely away or something. WTF! You wouldn't have THAT happen with tables!!!

Ok, yes, I'm going a little over the top.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

With a bit of educated guessing I got a 260. Argh, goodbye language geek status. I was proud of getting West Frisian though. At least I think it was West Frisian. I'd like to see the answers.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

So very much would I. Where are the answers?!

[slit.livejournal.com]

I guessed West Frisian, too, which I'm assuming is closer to Dutch and therefore closer to English? (East Frisian is the only minority European language I have any familiarity with at all, and that sounds more like English than any of the other languages there did/do.)

(I also got 260, & also due to educated guessing. Egad. Cool test, though.)

[slit.livejournal.com]

I like the Arabic alphabet better than the English (Latin, whatever) one. It feels more precise, and more consistent. Knowing how each letter connects to the next makes it harder than English, but then again they don't have capitals vs. lower-case and print vs. cursive, so in the end it evens out, I think. The grammar, though: ugh.

Also, Semitic languages just have more words, period, compared to English. I'm not an authority on this; you would know better than I do, but I've been told you can function in English with a vocabulary of 2,000 words, whereas in Arabic you need more like 5,000. Have you heard/read anything about that?

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I haven't, and now I'm fascinated. I think what I've heard is that English has one of the biggest crude numbers of lexical items -- in the range of hundreds of thousands, though I could COMPLETELY be pulling that out of my ass, too, and will go look it up once I've embarrassed myself publicly here. But ALSO that you can function in English not only just with 2,000 words, but with that Orwellian simplified 1,000 word vocabulary, which they've written a (very boring, no doubt) version of the Bible in.

I just did something with my students a few days ago where we looked at the notion of your working vocabulary. Apparently, from counts of lexical items and frequency in Shakespeare, he had an extremely, extremely large working vocabulary of around 29,000 words, where the average modern person (they didn't say if it was a modern English speaking person) has a working vocabulary of around 9,000 words. I hope that I'm up in the higher range, I've got to say. We're wasting an awful lot of words in English, if 9,000 words is more common.

Here is the Wikipedia stuff on English lexical items:

The Global Language Monitor, after combining definitions in the OED2 with those unique to other dictionaries, estimates that there are approximately 990,000 words in English. The editors of Merriam Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (475,000 definitions) in their preface, estimate the number to be much higher. This is much greater than the 185,000 terms in German, and the 100,000 in French.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

No such thing as over the top. I always find geekery attractive, in whatever form or flavor it comes.