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How can my native language (Sgaw Karen) be added to Google Translate?
I refer you to:
- I want to add a new language to Google Translate. How do I do that?
- What are Google Translate requirements and criteria to add new language into the list of translated languages?
- How do I add malayalam language to Google translate for translating from english to malayalam?
It’s a straight-out prioritisation game, and there are lots of reasons why Karen would be down the list.
- Not a majority language of a country or state (so you can’t do the lobbying that e.g. Mongolian did)
- Not a majority language of a country or state (so it’s simply not as pressing: Karen speakers with access to computers are likely already going to know Burmese)
- Not a majority language of a country or state (so it is unlikely to have generated an extensive corpus of bilingual text—without which, nothing is possible for Google Translate)
Now, Google can make exceptions, as languages take its fancy; Haitian Creole was one, for example, and an answer indicates that Google made a point of building the necessary bilingual resources. But (a) that’s for Google to build, not you, and (b) Google is going to prioritise by need, and there are a lot of unsupported languages with ten times the speakers: 8 Surprising Languages Not on Google Translate – K International
It’s an unsympathetic answer I know. I think the best you can do is contribute to the online presence of Karen, including getting involved with Drum Publications—so that there is more of a Karen corpus text. And building bilingual corpora is critical: translate things from English, and put them online. Without these, there’s no real point asking Google Translate for anything.
Online Unicode support for even Burmese was extremely late, so there is surely ground to be made up for Burmese-script Karen online.
What were the four kingdoms that emerged during the Hellenistic Era?
The Diadochi (/daɪˈædəkaɪ/; plural of Latin Diadochus, from Greek: Διάδοχοι, Diádokhoi, “successors”) were the rival generals, families and friends of Alexander the Great who fought for control over his empire after his death in 323 BC. The Wars of the Diadochi mark the beginning of the Hellenistic period.
…
How many successors?
Five Diadochi Dynasties
Due to the influence of the Prophecy of the Book of Daniel, chapter 8, many Christian commentaries state that there were only four primary diadochi. In truth, however, there were at least five primary dynasts throughout this period: Lysimachus [Thrace], Cassander [Macedon], Ptolemy [Egypt], Seleucus [Persia], and Antigonus Monophthalmus [Asia Minor].
After the Battle of Ipsus [301 BC], Antigonus was killed, but his son Demetrius took a large part of Macedonia and continued his father’s dynasty. Never during this period did only four diadochi control Alexander’s former dominion. After the death of Cassander and Lysimachus, following one another in fairly rapid succession, the Ptolemies [Egypt] and Seleucids [Syria] controlled the vast majority of Alexander’s former empire, with a much smaller segment controlled by the Antigonid dynasty [Macedon] until the first century.
It was one of four dynasties established by Alexander’s successors, the others being the Seleucid dynasty, Ptolemaic dynasty and Attalid dynasty.
The Attalid dynasty (/ˈætəlᵻd/; Greek: Δυναστεία των Ατταλιδών) was a Hellenistic dynasty that ruled the city of Pergamon after the death of Lysimachus, a general of Alexander the Great. The Attalid kingdom was the rump state left after the collapse of the Lysimachian Empire.
So, in the free-for-all after Alexander died, there were not really four successor states. There were a dozen-odd, then five, then three: Macedon, the Ptolemaic Empire, the Seleucid Empire. And maybe you can count Pergamon as a fourth.
If you do, though, wouldn’t you also count Epirus as a fifth? And what about the Pontus, and Galatia, and Cappadocia? The Greco-Bactrians? The Indo-Greeks?
What is the future of Machine Translation?
So… lemme get this straight. A guy who was worked for Google Translate is A2A’ing someone who did a couple of graduate courses on Machine Translation 20 years ago?
Once again, Adam, you flatter me.
We agree, and I defer to your superior expertise; I’ll just, eh, restate what you said.
Machine Translation is AI-hard: you need real understanding of the world to do accurate cross-context machine translation. AI has a long history of hype, and a long history of shifting goalposts. The current results of Machine Learning in Language are all around us here in Quoraland: they’re the bots, and they’re people popping over to Google Translate. How impressed are you? And yet, if you thought about this 10 years ago, you would be astonished at what they do. If you allow for their limitations, you still can be.
(I was astonished at my accidental discovery the other day, that Google Translate does so well with Augustine of Hippo. For the fairly obvious reason that the bilingual corpus of Latin it was trained on must have included Augustine of Hippo.)
The foreseeable future of machine translation I see is more of the same: more machine learning, more statistical methods, with maybe a bit more sensitivity to context, through better AI in the backends. What you’ll end up with is what people have been saying for a while you’ll end up with in AI: something that does very well in a specific domain it has been trained for, and not so well if it’s confronted with novel domains. So you will be able to use it as a tourist; arguably, you already can. You will be able to translate documents in a particular field. But the translator will still get confused very easily, once confronted with anything unfamiliar. People will be aware of that, and will work around it.
Minority languages will be supported a little by MT, but I dispute the overoptimistic belief that noone will need to learn English anymore, because machines will do the translating for you. Anyone who needs to make sure they are understood accurately for their job is not going to take the chance that the computer misconstrues them: they’re still going to learn English (or Mandarin or Spanish or Uzbek, or whatever the future lingua franca is), and make their own decisions about how to deal with ambiguity. And minority languages will still be restricted to the home and away from the public sphere, which is how languages die.
Or even worse, minority languages will devolve into translationese: the only Irish around will be whatever word-to-word translation from English the Google–Apple–McDonalds Translatatrix 4000 spits out.
The catch in all of this is that we have an event horizon of, I don’t know, 10–20 years for any prediction of the future in IT—past which, who knows. The Singularity may yet happen.
But AI has had a lot of hype, and a lot of shifting goalposts.
What does the inscription SOEGENG RAWOHIPOEN mean? Which language is it in?
Thank you Google
RAWOHIPOEN SOEGENG.
As Daniel Lindsäth pointed out, SOEGENG is Indonesian.
When you google SOEGENG, you get Sugeng, which reminds me that Indonesian used to be spelled more Dutch than it is now, including using oe.
I also realised that the SOEGENG comes first, the writing forms an arc.
SOEGENG RAWOH IPOEN. Switch the <oe> to <u>, you get SUGENG RAWOH IPUN. Google Translate renders SUGENG RAWUH IPUN as “welcome them”.
For the rest, ask someone who actually knows Indonesian.
EDIT: or Javanese. Thank you, Rizky Wirastomo
Is there a region in Canada where they have adopted the southern accent?
Not that I know, but there’s a region of the South that does a stereotypically Canadian thing.
The stereotypically Canadian thing is Canadian raising: pronouncing the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ as /ɐɪ/ and /ɐʊ/ before voiceless consonants. It’s the thing that Americans make fun of, by saying Canadians say aboot instead of about.
Canadian raising is not restricted to Canada.
I went down to Lynchburg, Virginia once; friend of mine’s folks are from there.
And what do you think I heard?
Aboot!
Sure wasn’t expecting a 70 year old southern gentleman to sound like Terrence and Philip.
Older Southern American English
The major central (Piedmont) and eastern (Tidewater) regions of Virginia, excluding its Eastern Shore, once spoke in a way long associated with the upper or aristocratic plantation class in the Old South, often known as a Tidewater accent. Additional phonological features of this Atlantic Southern variety included:
…
A possibility of both variants of Canadian raising:
- /aʊ/ pronounced as [aʊ], but [əʉ~ɜʉ] before a voiceless consonant.
- /aɪ/ pronounced as something like [aε~aæ], but possibly [ɐɪ] before a voiceless consonant.
If Salento’s Pizzica dance is Dionysian, could the Dabke be Minoan, given the Cretan religious influence in Gaza?
Let me try to unpack OP’s question.
The Tarantella, known in Salento as pizzica, is a dance associated with a hysterical condition known as Tarantism (supposedly triggered by a tarantula bite). A couple of scholars have speculated that tarantism is a survival of Ancient Greek bacchanalian rites, which were driven underground by the Roman senate. Villages in Salento are Greek-speaking to this day.
The Dabke is a Levantine Arab folk circle dance. A couple of scholars have speculated that it is of Canaanite or Phoenecian origin.
OP is taking a further step: since the Philistines of antiquity are widely believed to have been Minoan Cretans, and since we know that the Minoans had circle dances, might the Dabke not be of Cretan orgin? The pizzica, after all, looks like it’s of Greek origin.
Well, I don’t know much about the history of dance. But I do know from linguistics that recent areal diffusion is more plausible than millenia-old inheritance; and that much seeming similarity in a phenomenon can be explained through the limited options available for that phenomenon.
I was tempted to say that if you want a group of people to dance as a community, it’ll be either in a line or in a circle, so the similarity of the dabke and the Cretan syrtos may be a coincidence.
But Wikipedia’s Circle dance shows that the form is found everywhere in the Middle East and South-Eastern Europe (and Brittany), but not so much elsewhere. Given that, I won’t posit an inevitability of circle dances. Instead, I’ll posit areal diffusion. The notion of dancing in a circle may well be as old as Minoa. I don’t necessarily see that the Minoans transmitted it all the way from Malta to Azerbaijan; it may well have been in use throughout the area 3000 years ago already, or it might have gradually spread from place to place.
But if we have to explain how come a continuous area from Croatia to Kurdistan dances in circles, then having the dance leapfrog from Crete to Gaza doesn’t buy us much: it explains the Syrtos and the Dabke, but it doesn’t help explain the Hora and the Kochari. If you explain those as diffusion from the Syrtos and the Dabke, then you might as well explain all the circle dances as diffusion anyway.
Oh, and the bacchanalian origins of the tarantella are just one guess, too. You don’t need Dionysus to explain Dancing mania. Many of the documented mediaeval instances of that are in Germany.
Dedicated to Pegah Esmaili, for whom there is a world of difference between circle dances east and west of the Taurus mountains…
What do you know about Tsamouria (Chameria)? What is your opinion on ‘the Cham issue’?
What do I know about Çamëria/Τσαμουριά? Less than Dimitris Almyrantis, but still, I assume, more than most Greeks: I looked into the ethnic mix of the Balkans for my thesis in dialectology, since I needed to know where Greek was natively spoken.
I’ll add a couple of curios:
- The Tsamiko is one of the major dances of the Greek mainland; it merely means “the Çam dance”. Wikipedia points out the Çams didn’t actually dance it.
- There is a split in the ethnic Albanians of Greece, between the Arvanites (Arbëror) in southern Greece, who moved there in the 14th–16th century, and the Shqipëtars living across the border from Albania. The Arvanites speak an archaic version of Albanian that is clearly distinct from modern Tosk. The Shqipëtars in Greece speak variants of modern Tosk.
- Collections of songs or stories in Arvanitika done by Greeks (Arvanites) include Shqipëtar material, which is how I found out about them. (The main collection I used was Michail-Dede’s.) That, presumably, reflects Arvanites not eager to differentiate Shqipëtars as “more Albanian” than Arvanites. But grammatically, the two versions of Albanian are clearly different.
- Μιχαήλ-Δέδε, Μ. 1978–81. Αρβανίτικα Τραγούδια. 2 vols. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης.
- The Shqipëtars in Greece includes the Çams, who were Muslim. It also includes Christian Albanian-speakers, who have remained in place; for example, Lechovo (Florina prefecture), or Kimisi, in the municipality of Irakleia, Serres (migrated from Gjirokastër to European Turkey in Ottoman times, moved to Serres through the population exchanges with Turkey).
- People moved within the empire. That’s how Bulgarians ended up in Kızderbent in Bithynia (and now Polypetro in Chalkidiki).
- The ethnic Albanians, Shqipëtars and Arvanite, are of course distinct from the Albanian migrants of the past few decades, that Dimitris alludes to.
- The anecdote I’ve heard from accounts of ethnic Albanians in Greece (written by Arvanites) is that the Çams remaining in Thesprotia/Çamëria are down to a dozen; and it was impossible to elicit material in Albanian from them. Albanians here have said it’s more than that.
- Cretans in the 19th century, as Kazantzakis recorded, used the word Liapides Λιάπηδες to refer to the kilt-wearing soldiers of the mainland, the Evzones (tsoliades). I only realised a couple of months ago where the term derived from: it’s the Lab, the Albanian inhabitants of Labëria—right across the border from Çamëria. Most Lab are Bektashi Muslim, but the Greek Orthodox Albanians are Lab; and in those days, all Greek Orthodox mainlanders would have looked the same to Cretans.
So, that’s what I know. More about the Çams’ neighbours, it turns out, than the Çams themselves.
What do I think of the Çam issue?
All ethnic cleansing is repulsive. All ethnic cleansing leaves its country poorer, even if it arguably also leaves it more stable. It’s ancient history, it won’t be undone, and I don’t see any prospect of reparations. It would be good if more Greeks were even aware of it. For all I know, the thaw with Turkey points to a Greece in which more Greeks are aware of it; Dimitris knows, after all.
Then again, Dimitris is in many ways unrepresentative.
What auxiliary language or constructed language (conlang) would you like to learn and why?
I can’t count Esperanto, since I have already been fluent in it. Nor Klingon, ditto. Nor Lojban, ditto.
So let me go through the others, and say why or why not I’d like to learn it, if I was 20 again, back when I had the free time. Ranking from less to more.
- Láadan. Pfft. Hectoring mental straitjackets: not my thing.
- Toki Pona. Meh. Cutesy mental straitjackets: not my thing.
- Basic English: Nah. Disingenuous in its execution: too much English idiom in its phrasal verbs to count as truly minimal. I have a bit more time for its modern descendent, xkcd: Up Goer Five.
- Ido: No. Very close to Esperanto, and where it’s different, I didn’t like it: it was neither fish nor fowl in the schematic/naturalistic debate.
- Loglan: No. One logical language is more than enough.
- Novial: No. Rather more naturalistic than Ido, but never attracted me. Probably too much Germanic.
- Tolkien languages: … Nah. Lots of philological cuteness, but ultimately not enough vocabulary there, and too many gaps to be useable.
- Talossan: Almost yes. In fact, I was approached by King Ben way back to join the community. Given the ensuing shitfight in the micronation, I’m glad I didn’t.
- Dothraki: Almost yes. I tried in fact, but the vocabulary just wasn’t there, either. And the fact it got killed off in Season 2 enraged me against continuing it. (I want NO SPOILERS about Season 6. I watch Game of Thrones on DVD.)
- Volapük: Weak yes, for the cuteness factor of all those moods, especially in its baroque original form, as opposed to the stripped down post-1931 version.
- Occidental: Yes. It was the best of the naturalistic languages, as the closest approximation to the pseudo–Franco-Italian they were ultimately going for. I enjoyed reading through the back issues of Cosmoglotta—although it got nasty towards the end, when they were gloating that Esperanto had been banned by the Nazis, and then got banned themselves.
- Interlingua: Yes. Like Joachim Pense said, all the good bits of Latin. Probably more Peano’s Latino Sine Flexione than Gode’s more Vulgar Latinate version which won out; but I’m delighted on the rare occasion that I use software with an Interlingua interface (Mantis Bug Tracker).
- Interglosa: Yes yes yes. It’s less neat than I remember it from when I first came across it; but its attempt to reduce all verbs to a dozen or so verb valencies plus adverbs make it a thing of beauty. And I rejoice that Xavi Abadia has unearthed the unpublished Interglosa dictionary, and put it online.
- Not to be confused with its epigone Glosa, which takes out much of the good stuff.
Do the men of Crete still practice their archery for which they were so famous?
Like Vasilios Danias said, archery would have died out in Crete when rifles came to town; the point of archery, after all, was hunting. And Cretans sure love their rifles now, as Dimitra Triantafyllidou illustrates.
But there’s ample evidence of archery used in hunting during Venetian rule, when guns were but new (and presumably not very sportsmanlike), and Crete was still full of deer. In the Erotokritos, the culminating poem of the period, Charidimos the Cretan shoots his new wife with an arrow accidentally while hunting. Panoria, in the pastoral drama named after her, is a huntress who speaks of her bow and arrow. So archery was still a thing in the 17th century.
The celebratory gunfire thing is already reminisced about in the Cretan War of Marino Zane Bounialis (Pugnali), which recounts the Ottoman conquest; so it makes sense that archery died out in Crete at around that time, when rifles became universal.
Do Greeks who came from Turkey in 1960 have a different accent?
1960 in the question certainly alludes to Istanbul Greeks.
There has been minimal attention paid to the dialect of Constantinople/Istanbul, because it was an urban dialect, and historical linguists were interested in the countryside, as more archaic material: Constantinople itself had all unstressed vowels, like Southern Greece, and unlike the villagers of Thrace, who reduced unstressed vowels—as Northern Greece does.
I’ve just discovered that Valentina Fedchenko of St Petersburg State University has written a paper on the language of Constantinopolitan Greeks in Athens, in 2007: Les Grecs de Constantinople à Athènes: perception d’une langue étrangère. (For any Greek linguists reading: yes, she’s one of Maxim Kisilier’s students. Looks like Fedchenko is now working on Yiddish.)
The shibboleths of Constantinopolitan, which I already knew about, and which (as far as I know) it shares with Thracian dialect are:
- Use of που rather than πως as a complementiser.
- Use of διω rather than δω as the subjunctive aorist for ‘see’.
- Use of accusative rather than genitive indirect objects (common with Macedonian and Thessalian Greek)
I’ll summarising what I’m seeing in Fedchenko’s paper:
- Lots of codeswitching into Turkish, even to the extent of putting Turkish inflections on Greek words
- Lots of French words—and dismay that Athenians are too unsophisticated to use those French words. (They should have been around a century ago.) Examples, to freak Greek readers out: mentalité, civilisé, dîner, cure-dent, quartier, vendeuse, politesse, garçon, demande.
- Resistance to assimilating linguistically, with some use of dialect to avoid being understood, but also much pride in their variant as more correct than the Athenian standard.
- Particular relish for dialectal archaisms (such as απίδι rather than αχλάδι for ‘pear’), which to them elevate the status of their variant.
- Continuing cultivation of katharevousa.
- There have been some recent dictionaries of the variant; I’m annoyed that I hadn’t heard of them.