All posts by internetswadesh

Chinese 21 Nov 2015

20151121-Chinese-Swadesh

Another Chinese list, not as weird as some of the other ones, but plenty of gratuitous cheesecake. I’ve been using screenshots of the ad-linked returns as samples here, but I might start skipping them and use the first “real” image return instead for later grids. I haven’t decided if that’s true to the project or not.

Russian 07 Nov 2015

20151107-Russian-Swadesh

This time the Russian Internet Swadesh was nowhere near as wacky as last time, although that would be hard to come by. It is very different from last time, however; yandex.ru served up different images for probably 60% of the words in the grid, maybe more. It’s probably the most volatile of the six lists I’m doing. I also got two “no image” placeholders for the first return for two of the items; I went with the second image return for those.

French 01 Nov 2015

20151101-French-Swadesh

So today’s French Swadesh was kinda normal with not a lot of surprises, except for the dude in SCUBA gear sitting at a desk signing papers for 144 couler (to flow), and the three cartoon couples having energetic sex for 180 chaud (hot). This would be as good enough time as any to let me express my irrational distaste for the round-headed cartoon clip-art guy who features in such images as 134 tirer (to pull) and 135 pousser (to push). The drawings are relatively competent, as they manage to exhibit a good eye for body posture and general feel, but for some reason they annoy me no end.

English 24 Oct 2015

20151024-English-Swadesh

Not a huge amount to report, the English Swadesh is pretty tame in comparison to the other languages. Dreamatico.com is losing the SEO image competition to weknowyourdreams.com, which is amusing. It seems that the base reason for Google image searching in the English-speaking world is dream interpretation, if the SEO trolls are to be believed.

Arabic 19 Oct 2015

20151019-Arabic-Swadesh

A couple days late, my apologies, travel intervened. The Arabic list didn’t have anything terribly weird or amusing to report, besides the fact that dragging and dropping a good number of images caused the Mac OS Finder to crash. Perhaps a UTC-8 Arabic coding bug? Dunno. Saw some St-Takla.org returns again, and shof.m5zn.com made its presence known, but not really in a SEO way. Also, Twitter avatars popped up as results more often than not.

Thus ends the third round of sets, and I’ll start over with English next week. Should be interesting to see the changes from last time.