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The Adelphi Language Recognition Quiz Answers

I'd like to thank everyone who took part in our Language Recognition Quiz at the recent Health and Housing Exhibition in Harrogate. Congratulations to the three winners who took home a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon (unless they drank it on the stand, of course).

The quiz was actually very difficult and only a handful of entrants answered more than three out of the five correctly. Special mention must be made of Ana, the scanner lady, who managed 4 out of 5, and Abdul on the stand next to ours who got ALL FIVE CORRECT! Fortunately for the rest of you both had entered 'for fun' and were not included in the draw.

Many of you were curious to know the answers. I didn't have time to get round the three halls again to let you all know so here they are....

A
	BENGALI (Bangla) Bengali is the national and official language of Bangladesh and one of the 23 official languages recognised by the Republic of India. It's spoken by about 200 million people and is written using the Bangla script, a member of the Brahimic family of scripts used in India.
B
	CHINESE (Simplified) This is Chinese, the simplified version, which is used in Mainland China and Singapore. This was developed by the Chinese government in the 50s to promote literacy by reducing the number of strokes in certain characters.
C
	FARSI Apologies for this one. It was a bit sneaky. Many of you recognised the Arabic script, modified versions of which are used to write several languages throughout the Muslim world including Dari and Farsi. Farsi is spoken in Iran and Afghanistan as well as in Tajikistan, where it is written using the Cyrillic alphabet. Because it was a bit naughty I gave half a point to those who recognised the Arabic script, including the Arabic speaker from Morocco who 'didn't bother reading it' and so didn't realise it wasn't Arabic! Had she done so the wine would have been hers!
D
	VIETNAMESE The official language of Vietnam, spoken by about 86% of the population. It was once written using Chinese characters but the current alphabet is a variant of the Latin script with added diacritics to represent additional sounds and the five tones of the language. Lots of you got this one right!
E
	JAPANESE Japanese is written using a modified version of Chinese and the difficulty is to distinguish between the two. The trick is to look for the 'Hiragana' and 'Katakana' letters, which are much simpler in form than the borrowed Chinese characters. In the sample below の (pronounced 'no') is a good one to look for, as is は (ha or wa), as they are very common and not a part of the Chinese script.