Category Archives: Swadesh

English 28 Feb 2016

20160228-English-Swadesh

Round 7 of the Internet Swadesh Grids begins with English again. One interesting thing I noticed this time around, the English Swadesh list tends to pick up more logos than others. Also, I was again struck by how much SEO clickholes tend to love them some dream interpretation — globe-views.com and weknowyourdreamz.com have emerged as new contenders for dream-based GIS spam. And it’s come up before, but this time I wanted to give a shoutout to the Toy Hall of Fame for their entry for 53 stick, which pops up from their page depicting it as one of the oldest toys.

Arabic 21 Feb 2016

20160221-Arabic-Swadesh

One interesting thing about the Arabic GIS, or at least the UAE GIS, is the number of ragecomics characters that come up. Only some of them make it into the Internet Swadesh grid, but it looks like the Arabic world definitely groks those feels.

This time around, I noticed that this particular little suggested search box would come up more often than not, for words that were not terribly related to exploring sexual positions. LOL.

CommonSearchBox

Chinese 14 Feb 2016

20160214-Chinese-Swadesh

A Chinese Swadesh for Valentines Day. I’ve gone with the new strategy of taking the first non-paid image return from Baidu as the representative for the word; this is probably a good call, especially because when I accidentally clicked on a paid return, Firefox gave me a “attack site” warning. Whoopsie!

French 23 Jan 2016

20160123-French-Swadesh

New French Swadesh. The image hosting site Canope showed up again this time, the five color words almost had a complete set of color fields except for 177 noir (which has a little cat head in the upper left corner), and 191 émoussé showed up as an actual definition.

Chinese 02 Jan 16

20160102-Chinese-Swadesh

A new Chinese list, done on the heels of the Spanish list, as the holidays kinda backed things up. For this one I decided to go with the first return that Baidu supplies that is not a sponsored link. Before, I went with the very first image returned regardless of reason, but I think that using sponsored links is not quite in keeping with the project concept. It’s also easier to get a cleaner image, as I don’t have to screenshot around the text that Baidu appends over the clickthrough image.

Not as crazy as most, this one features solid color squares for all five color terms (172-176).

Spanish 01 Jan 16

20160101-Spanish-Swadesh

This Spanish Swadesh was a victim of holiday travel and then holiday illness. I was hoping to have it done on Wednesday 29 December, when I returned from California, but the common cold intervened.

This one seemed to be pretty different from the last one while I was compiling it, and comparing the file seemed to bear that out. No major weirdness, alas.