things I have loved I'm allowed to keep ([info]yareach) wrote in [info]linguaphiles,
2005-01-18 23:46:00
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  • Mood: geeky
  • Music: Lullaby for Cain -- Sinéad O'Connor

Thought you guys might enjoy

They are renovating the tram stops in Zurich at the moment, to make all the curbs higher so that it's easier to get on the trams. Anyway, at the tram stop near the main station, they decided to put a "high step" warning on the curb to make sure people didn't trip. I guess they wanted to make sure everyone understood:

Pardon me if I totally mess up the languages: I tried my best!


edit: Danish, thank you! -- German -- Romansch


French -- English -- Greek


Uh... Romansch, again? -- Dutch


Arabic edit: Persian? -- uuhhhh... (I'm crap at Asian languages, forgive!) edit: ok, so, I've been told Traditional Chinese


Swahili (!) -- Turkish -- I'm a failure!!!! edit: and Simplified Chinese


Serbian -- This is the point at which I laughed aloud and people started thinking I was crazy. Not that they probably didn't think so before, what with my standing on the tram tracks, photographing the curb...


Spanish -- edit: Swedish, doh!


Italian -- Portuguese


Russian (!)


Finnish -- added: Czech
Tags: humor, photos

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  • 60 comments

[info]akasha_orsini

January 18 2005, 22:46:38 UTC 7 years ago

:=Þ

lmao. I can see why you were laughing. lmao

[info]dukesnorre

January 18 2005, 22:46:45 UTC 7 years ago

Not Norwegian-Danish. Also, the czech looks Swedish to me.

Dangit, no Norwegian. :( SO SAD.

[info]yareach

January 18 2005, 22:53:18 UTC 7 years ago

That's because it is Swedish, and I'm a complete moron! I'd switched the pictures, without switching the name. Should be ok now, thank you!

[info]czas_na_zywiec

7 years ago

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[info]ermenengilda

January 18 2005, 22:49:45 UTC 7 years ago

I suppose it doesn't really matter, but the language next to Spanish is definitely not Czech :-)
How readable does Egyptian appear, though ;-)

[info]ex_stephmog743

January 18 2005, 23:09:37 UTC 7 years ago

It looks like Serbo-Croat to me.

[info]z111

7 years ago

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[info]kaikias

7 years ago

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[info]squodge

January 18 2005, 22:56:13 UTC 7 years ago

That has GOT to be the funniest set of photos I've ever seen! GOOD WORK!

~ squodge ~

[info]tydaj

January 18 2005, 22:59:38 UTC 7 years ago

Nice!
I'm guessing the Asian ones are Chinese and Japanese, respectively. From what I can tell the Chinese like using a lot less characters to express things than their neighbours to the east.

[info]daemon_will

January 18 2005, 23:23:31 UTC 7 years ago

Something to do with the Japanese using what started as a Chinese script to write a completely different type of language, I think. I have just started being interested in East Asian languages, particularly Mandarin and Japanese.

Pleased to meet you all, this is all fascinating.

邪魔 威尔

[info]marzipan_sunday

7 years ago

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[info]dontbeakakke

7 years ago

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[info]marzipan_sunday

7 years ago

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[info]markusn

7 years ago

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[info]yaymatt

January 18 2005, 23:00:18 UTC 7 years ago

i work for a swiss company.

they try to prepare for everything, to the point of overkill.

[info]yareach

January 18 2005, 23:10:38 UTC 7 years ago

I know: I'm Swiss. Heh!

Though I really think they've taken it to a new level with the hieroglyphics! :P

[info]yaymatt

7 years ago

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[info]ex_req431

7 years ago

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[info]nadyezhda

January 18 2005, 23:02:39 UTC 7 years ago

Your guess on the Russian is right.

[info]yareach

January 18 2005, 23:05:03 UTC 7 years ago

Woohoo! I'm hoping this somehow makes up for the Swedish/Czech fiasco... :P

[info]shiro_no_wired

January 18 2005, 23:10:25 UTC 7 years ago

I think that "I'm a failure!!!!" is Japanese...
"uhhh" is Chinese, unless I'm much mistaken.

ermenengilda said wrote "How readable does Egyptian appear, though ;-)"
--It's like Japanese, with both phonetic and ideographic components. Read from the direction the characters (here quails) are facing. (ie left to right.) Read "r[e]w[e]d[e]w ħetem" Most vowels aren't written, so "e" is assumed.

[info]rosst

January 18 2005, 23:11:12 UTC 7 years ago

I actually don't think that's Arabic, because the first character (the one on the right, a p sound) isn't in traditional Arabic. It might just be a foreign word (palatun?), or it might be any number of other languages written in the Arabic alphabet.

And yes, that's Chinese and Japanese, respectively.

[info]ex_req431

January 18 2005, 23:44:56 UTC 7 years ago

is that gorilla face fucking her?

[info]trixieleitz

7 years ago

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[info]mad_pig

7 years ago

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[info]yareach

7 years ago

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[info]markusn

7 years ago

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[info]vampiresetsuna

January 18 2005, 23:14:31 UTC 7 years ago

The third one with the swahili and terkish is japanese. At least, the kanji are japanese. Amusingly it says step caution, and not very politely! Nothing about high in there. ^__~

[info]bookly

January 18 2005, 23:26:39 UTC 7 years ago

I think you can translate it as "Watch your step", and IIRC, written Japanese tends to be much less formal -- technical articles are written without using polite endings!

[info]the_cowch

January 18 2005, 23:23:26 UTC 7 years ago

Three things.

That's pretty awesome.

Does modern Egyptian even still use hieroglyphics?

They forgot Korean!

[info]ex_req431

January 18 2005, 23:45:41 UTC 7 years ago

Re: Three things.

oh dude! I just said that up there! I said, ancient egyptians, but not koreans hahah ^5

[info]tysaroe

7 years ago

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[info]the_cowch

7 years ago

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[info]tysaroe

7 years ago

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[info]the_cowch

7 years ago

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[info]genarti

7 years ago

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[info]decemberjuliet

January 18 2005, 23:26:10 UTC 7 years ago

They certainly did prepare! The hieroglyphics had me laughing :)

[info]misworded

January 18 2005, 23:50:47 UTC 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure the first one is Norwegian, not Danish.

[info]yareach

January 19 2005, 13:48:10 UTC 7 years ago

Hm, I first had Norwegian, and was told it was Danish! :P

[info]timwi

January 18 2005, 23:52:06 UTC 7 years ago

"Ngazi ndefu" is indeed Swahili. Also, both of the phrases that you designated as Romansch appear to be Romansch — as we know, there are at least three major dialects of Romansch all with their own official orthography. "s-chalin ot" appears to be the Graubünden dialect (Grisons?).

I'm disappointed there's no Esperanto.

[info]yareach

January 19 2005, 13:45:51 UTC 7 years ago

Rumantsch Grischun, do you mean? All the dialects of Romantsch are pretty much contained in the Grisons, but in 1982, they created one unified writing system for all the dialects and called it Rumantsch Grischun. I don't know enough about the differences in the dialects to be able to tell them apart: I can just recognize them as Romansch, mostly because I can usually understand them. :P

[info]chocopoptart

January 18 2005, 23:53:03 UTC 7 years ago

Whoa.. that's great! ..Yeah no korean up there :( 통탄스러운 잔인한 사건! j/k :P

Highly amusing.

[info]yareach

January 19 2005, 13:20:17 UTC 7 years ago

I'll let the tram company know... ;)

[info]targaff

January 19 2005, 00:06:16 UTC 7 years ago

I swear, renovating tram stops in Zurich is a full-time hobby of the city, I think. They were doing that along the main street just a couple of years ago when I visited a few times.

[info]yareach

January 19 2005, 13:24:49 UTC 7 years ago

Well, now they've introduced a new tram with no steps leading up to it, so if they raise all the curbs, the tram will be flush with the pavemement and be wheelchair accessible, which is really good and all, but I really do hate the look of the new trams and all the construction going on the fix all the stops... :(

[info]intercat

January 19 2005, 00:36:58 UTC 7 years ago

this totally made my day. :)

[info]icarus_suraki

January 19 2005, 00:47:52 UTC 7 years ago

O i miss Zurich so much now!
And the trams too.
This really just made my day. :)

[info]lauren

January 19 2005, 00:49:32 UTC 7 years ago

What, no Hebrew? :: laughs ::

[info]yadfothgildloc

January 19 2005, 01:20:04 UTC 7 years ago

I'll second the "mah, ein ivrit?" and add a "cur non in latina est?"

[info]yareach

January 19 2005, 13:21:11 UTC 7 years ago

Oh! They really should have done Latin! Haha!

[info]the_gypsy_queen

January 19 2005, 04:25:21 UTC 7 years ago

escalón alto - Spanish (above the Swedish one)

This is pretty cool!

[info]tungol

January 19 2005, 04:57:50 UTC 7 years ago

Hah! The hieroglyphics make it great! Someone must have been having fun there - surely they didn't actually expect hieroglyphics to be widely read.

[info]dadi

January 19 2005, 09:01:39 UTC 7 years ago

great post :) thank you!!

[info]dnlr

January 19 2005, 17:58:19 UTC 7 years ago

Where's Quechua and Manx? :P

[info]yareach

January 19 2005, 18:05:51 UTC 7 years ago

I shall inform the proper authorities of the omission. :P

[info]daemon_will

January 20 2005, 00:28:18 UTC 7 years ago

Chinese

My Chinese friend says that the first one (the two character one) is Traditional Chinese, and the four-character one is Simplified Chinese: both meaning "Mind your step".

In Taiwan and Hong Kong SAR (special administrative region) they still use Traditional Chinese, where as in the PRC (where she's from) they use a simplified form introduced in the 20th Century to aid literacy.

So apparently they're both Chinese - Japanese looks like ステップを気にしなさい according to Google, so different script.

[info]yareach

January 20 2005, 23:08:14 UTC 7 years ago

Re: Chinese

Thank you very much! I really am quite useless with East Asian languages, so I didn't even attempt to guess; I just went with what I was told. *tries to shift the blame off herself* :P

[info]daemon_will

6 years ago

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[info]yareach

6 years ago

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