Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

The fine folks over at one of my favorite blogs, Language Log, occasionally run a language quiz, wherein they invite readers to identify unknown languages from a recording.

I thought it might be fun to have a similar contest here, and I just ran across a blog that would be a perfect test scenario: oldulo

As a bit of inspection will reveal, the blog is in Japanese and Esperanto.

Imagine for a moment that you know nothing of either — most people who can read English can make out a few words of Esperanto, after all. (Japanese is another story, but even if you know some Japanese, pretend you don’t.)

Unlike the Language Log quizzes, there isn’t really an “answer” here, I’m just interested in peoples’ thoughts. Well, there is an answer, but it’s not terribly hard to find — the interesting bit is the approach.

Okay, enough preliminaries, here’s the challenge:

Make the case for whether or not the Japanese and Esperanto texts in each post are in fact translations of each other, and do so without reference to any of the following:

• Transliteration
• Dictionaries
• Google

I’ll probably do up some Python scripts, myself, but use any other tools you’re familiar with, up to and including plain old reason.

If you happen to speak both Esperanto and Japanese… well… pretend you don’t, or wait for the next challenge. ☺