Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
7 thoughts on “Language Quiz”
Judging from some of the sounds and the type of music I think it must be a language from the Indian subcontinent.
I can’t seem to find out what the answer was for the previous language quiz. I thought it was a language from southern Africa but I couldn’t see the previous language quiz listed so I can’t go in and find out the answer.
At first I thought the same as hank, but I have heard the word ‘vahine’ which in Mahorí means woman, and perhaps in some other Polynesian language, although not for example in Samoan, which is ‘fafine’. I am inclined to a Polynesian language-very much less complex phonetically than the Indo-Aryans. maybe mahorí.
I don’t think there are enough aspirated consonants to suggest Indo-Aryan.
The answer is Kurukh (कुड़ुख़), a Dravidian language spoken in Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Bihar and West Bengal in India, and also in Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.
David, when you say Mahorí, do you mean Māori, the indigeonous language of New Zealand (Aotearoa), in which woman is not ‘vahine’, but it is ‘wahine’?
@Hohepa
Yes, ‘ma(h)orí’ is Spanish for Maori. For ‘wahine’ and ‘vahine’ in Nuclear Polynesian languages see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Polynesian/fafine and note that both are permissible spellings of the word that has come to mean ‘Polynesian woman’ in English. (English speakers pronounce them differently but Polynesian languages, including Maori, typically lack a phonemic w~v distinction.) — ‘Fafine’ which David mentions for Samoan is the reconstructed Proto-Polynesian form that is conserved in several modern languages.
Judging from some of the sounds and the type of music I think it must be a language from the Indian subcontinent.
I can’t seem to find out what the answer was for the previous language quiz. I thought it was a language from southern Africa but I couldn’t see the previous language quiz listed so I can’t go in and find out the answer.
At first I thought the same as hank, but I have heard the word ‘vahine’ which in Mahorí means woman, and perhaps in some other Polynesian language, although not for example in Samoan, which is ‘fafine’. I am inclined to a Polynesian language-very much less complex phonetically than the Indo-Aryans. maybe mahorí.
I don’t think there are enough aspirated consonants to suggest Indo-Aryan.
The answer is Kurukh (कुड़ुख़), a Dravidian language spoken in Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Bihar and West Bengal in India, and also in Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.
The recording comes from YouTube:
David, when you say Mahorí, do you mean Māori, the indigeonous language of New Zealand (Aotearoa), in which woman is not ‘vahine’, but it is ‘wahine’?
@Hohepa
Yes, ‘ma(h)orí’ is Spanish for Maori. For ‘wahine’ and ‘vahine’ in Nuclear Polynesian languages see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Polynesian/fafine and note that both are permissible spellings of the word that has come to mean ‘Polynesian woman’ in English. (English speakers pronounce them differently but Polynesian languages, including Maori, typically lack a phonemic w~v distinction.) — ‘Fafine’ which David mentions for Samoan is the reconstructed Proto-Polynesian form that is conserved in several modern languages.