# What language is this? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 15, 2007, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868 "2007-07-15T16:42:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Linty\_Fresh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Linty\_Fresh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Linty_Fresh)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/21 "2007-07-16T00:28:38Z")
[QUOTE=Thinktank] **Linty Fresh** my wife should be writing this thing herself, but she is telling me that “so mnoy” is Russian for “with me”. She has an immense interest in languages and in learning them so I’ll take her word for it. It’s also not Bosnian, no word on Serbian. [/QUOTE] Your wife is right, of course. My Russian is pretty rusty, I’m afraid. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/22 "2007-07-16T00:48:22Z")
We can always try to eliminate the actual Slavic languages one by one. Here’s Russian: Добрый день, Григорий. Приходи со (за\*) мной Dobry den’, Grigory. Prikhodi so (za\*) mnoy. Good day, Gregory. Come with me. \*I think “za” is what a Russian would use for this, but I am not a fluent speaker. Ukranian for “Good day” is Добрий день, very similar to Russian. Byleorussian is Добры дзень. The Slovene word for day is _dán_. Czech is _den_. Slovak is also _den_, but with a mark over the n, and Polish is _dzien_, with another mark over the n. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/23 "2007-07-16T01:14:43Z")
I had a crazy idea that the vowel \ in “dobru” and “Grigoru” may be meant to mimic the shape of Cyrillic \<и\> (the vowel /i/). Russian chat alphabet or Volapjuk spelling use roman ASCII letters to mimic Cyrillic letters that way. Which raises the question of why it also uses a regular Roman \. Maybe because both graphemes exist in Ukrainian? I’ve also seen Roman \ used for /u/. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/24 "2007-07-16T02:25:03Z")
[QUOTE=Q.E.D.] The [Xerox Language Guesser](http://www.xrce.xerox.com/competencies/content-analysis/tools/guesser-ISO-8859-1.en.html) says Slovenian. [/QUOTE] I typed in a sentence in romanized Korean and the guesser guessed “French.” When I typed it in using the Korean alphabet, the guesser guessed “Unknown.” ---
**Author:** ![Scienceman123](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Scienceman123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scienceman123)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/25 "2007-07-16T03:35:15Z")
I typed “I am a black man” and it said Welsh. (By the way, I am Caucasian.) ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/26 "2007-07-16T03:45:14Z")
[QUOTE=Thinktank] So I have a strong feeling this is Romanian. [/QUOTE] It’s absolutely not Romanian. It’s absolutely Slavic. 100%. I guess given the further background by _Wendell_, I’m guessing it’s just a Slavic hodgepodge made-up for the novel, to give the character a sense of Eastern European-ness, without pinning him/her down to a specific country. ---
**Author:** ![groman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/73ab20/32.png) [@groman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/groman)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/27 "2007-07-16T05:09:55Z")
In Russian there’s no matching pronoun that declines to “min”. The verb “prihodit’” does not make sense in the imperative with the preposition “so”. Closest Russian sentence would be: Dobriy den, Grigoriy. Prihodi so mnoi. And it’s almost non-sensical unless perfectly contextualized as an answer to the question “A s kem mne prihodit’?” (And with whom am I supposed to come?) Literally it would be like “Good day, Grigoriy. Come with ME along!” (Only makes sense in English as an answer to a question using ‘along’, otherwise it would be just ‘Come with me!’) This is also non-sensical in Ukrainian and Belarusian as far as I can tell. Now enough with what it ain’t and let’s figure out what it am: I’m stumped. As far as I can tell “со мин” (“so min”) is not a valid preposition-pronoun combination in any Slavic language. Nor is “Prihud so” or any other variants. I’m thinking it’s a very very contorted version of something scribbled in Cyrillics on a napkin, possibly originally in Macedonian 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/28 "2007-07-16T14:34:16Z")
Anthony Boucher is long dead, so contacting him is not an option. ---
**Author:** ![Linty\_Fresh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Linty\_Fresh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Linty_Fresh)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/29 "2007-07-16T23:53:23Z")
Something just occured to me. Whatever the language, _Grigoru_ is the Slavic name for Gregory. What if instead of a novel, it showed up in Boucher’s radio show [The Casebook of Gregory Hood](http://www.thrillingdetective.com/hood.html). That would make a lot of sense, because it would be easy to make a couple of spelling mistakes while hearing the language, and in any case, Anthony could well have gotten the phrase by asking a friend of his who maybe studied Russian or whatever for a semester, which would further goof the phrase up. Kind of a stretch, but it _would_ make sense. ---
**Author:** ![Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/96bed5/32.png) [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patty_O_Furniture)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2007, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/30 "2007-07-16T23:57:24Z")
[QUOTE=Q.E.D.] The [Xerox Language Guesser](http://www.xrce.xerox.com/competencies/content-analysis/tools/guesser-ISO-8859-1.en.html) says Slovenian. [/QUOTE] I typed in some Vietnamese (chúng ta nęn cám ơn) and that page thinks it’s Irish\_utf8, whatever that is. ---
**Author:** ![MelCthefirst](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/eada6e/32.png) [@MelCthefirst](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MelCthefirst)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2007, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/31 "2007-07-17T00:05:27Z")
[QUOTE=Patty O’Furniture] I typed in some Vietnamese (chúng ta nęn cám ơn) and that page thinks it’s Irish\_utf8, whatever that is. [/QUOTE] Heh - I just type in ‘you are a fool’ in flawless Japanese - it said it was Malay. ---
**Author:** ![Tristan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tristan/32/18058_2.png) [@Tristan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tristan)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2007, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/32 "2007-07-17T00:14:56Z")
[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner] Anthony Boucher is long dead, so contacting him is not an option. [/QUOTE] Slacker. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2007, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/33 "2007-07-17T00:34:06Z")
[QUOTE=Monty] I typed in a sentence in romanized Korean and the guesser guessed “French.” When I typed it in using the Korean alphabet, the guesser guessed “Unknown.” [/QUOTE] I gave it a sentence in my conlang Mömö - _Mü meni Mömö gelki ba the anun tonïmoyath_ - and it said “Hungarian,” a reasonable guess since Hungarian is one-fourth of the source material. I gave it a sentence in Uzbek and it said “Turkish.” Not _too_ far off, but it obviously could stand a bit of fine tuning. It must not have all the national languages of the world programmed into it, let alone minority ones. So it would probably mistake an obscure Slavic language for a more prominent one. Anybody know Sorbian, Kashubian, or Old Church Slavonic? There exists a pan-Slavic conlang as **pulykamell** speculated. _Panie i panowie_, meet [Slovio](http://www.slovio.com/)! ---
**Author:** ![cwthree](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/9de0a6/32.png) [@cwthree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cwthree)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2007, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/34 "2007-07-17T00:34:43Z")
Bulgarian, perhaps? I’ll check with my household Bulgarian speaker when he comes in. ---
**Author:** ![Geek\_Mecha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecae2f/32.png) [@Geek\_Mecha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Geek_Mecha)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2007, 2:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868/35 "2007-07-17T02:05:00Z")
The language guesser thought Hawaiian was Swahili, which is pretty off considering Hawaiian doesn’t have T, B, J, D, Z, V, or S, and Swahili does. A shame, though-- that tool could be useful in my line of work. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-is-this/411868.md?page=1)