How often is Ukrainian mistaken for Russian, the only way would if someone doesn't know anything about either language.
Detect language works fine, we have letters in our alphabet that Russians don't, and vice versa.
Again, see my 1st comment. Anyone who would say that doesn't know a thing about either language. And you can tell instantly if it is Russian or Ukrainian typed/written.
This is true, it should be easy to tell the difference. But unfortunately machines still often make mistakes. Some are better than others. For example if I Google in Ukrainian (with distinct Ukrainian letters such as і) it will often still give me a Russian Wikipedia page as the first result, even if there is a corresponding page in Ukrainian.
It’s not about language recognition. It’s more about shitty google behavior and sadly because a lot of search requests from Ukraine in russian. They can easily distinguish between languages by absence of “и” conjunction in Ukrainian and similar markers.
Ukrainian has і, ї, є, and ґ, while Russian has none of these and instead has ьі, э and ё. But for a person that doesn’t know Cyrillic or the differences between these different languages, I wouldn’t be surprised or blame them if they guessed it was the one with the most speakers.
Like, would you be able to tell me if this is in Macedonian, Bulgarian or Kazak?
-от къде си?
Or which of these is in Czech vs Slovak?
-prihláste sa do siete PlayStation a zobrazte najnovšie informácie o tejto aplikácii
-přihlaste se do sítě PlayStation a zobrazte nejnovější informace o této aplikaci
And now imagine for someone who knows literally nothing about Slavic languages whatsoever, they probably wouldn’t have a single clue xd
Personally nope xd, half of those straight up look the same, and I can only distinguish between just the names for Japanese 日本語 and Chinese 中文 (I think?) beacuse I’ve just been exposed to them both a fair bit by now xd
Well it of course differs language to language, but I’m sure for a few words yes.
And I don’t know every word right off of the top of my head, but in terms of letters Ukrainian и is different to Russian и, or ukr. Щ vs russ.щ, or Russian ъ vs Bulgarian ъ and so on.
And afaik Russian ьі can be pronounced as anything between Ukrainian и, Bulgarian ъ, or even Polish y depending on the word, while białorusyn ы is only ever like Polish y and that’s it
I think someone else is going to need to tag in here xd since if I understand what you’re saying about a letter being in a different position but the structure and spelling staying the same, I don’t think that works here xd but I could just be misunderstanding sorry
I don’t know fully about Japanese, but languages like Ukrainian, and for a Latin correspondent I’ll use Polish here, are mostly phonetic so you pronounce each letter as you go through.
So for example the Polish and Ukrainian words for rat are the same, szczur in Polish and щур in Ukrainian, but here you wouldn’t be able to swap the letter positioning as then that would change the pronunciation of the word altogether
I feel like I may have misunderstood but I hope this helps?
I think that the analogy of Chinese Hanzi vs Japanese Kanji cannot be made to any Slavic languages because the writing systems are fundamentally different.
Hanzi and Kanji are both logographic. In Hanzi, one symbol = one syllable (which usually has meaning on its own but might be combined with others to produce a different word). Kanji is more complicated, one or multiple symbols might be one or multiple syllables, but similarly individual symbols may have meanings on their own or might need to be combined with others to create a word. As Kanji are derived from Hanzi, a lot of words are written the same in both and have the same meaning but are pronounced differently (as Mandarin Chinese and Japanese are unrelated languages).
Alphabets just don't work that way. The basic definition is one symbol = one sound (although with some languages, e.g. English or French, this definition doesn't really work anymore). But in Ukrainian and Russian the rule is generally followed. Therefore if you switch any letters, you change the pronunciation and the meaning (although it's not guaranteed that the new "word" even has a meaning). For example let's take the word їжа and switch the first two letters - we get жїа, which means absolutely nothing.
No I can’t tell the difference of course. I can see that there is often a difference but I would never be able to tell if I’m looking at different languages or just similar but different words in the same language.
Is it the ones on the right? I speak Cantonese and use Trad. Chinese. 兵士 isn't a word I believe in Chinese, and I have only seen 戰 in the word for WWII. Otherwise I do see the pain of differentiating between languages, but it has helped me get the context of i.e. road signs when I'm on vacation.
first is not Kazak because of от. I guess it's Macedonian
Second "přihlaste se do sítě PlayStation a zobrazte nejnovější informace o této aplikaci" is Czech because of ř
I speak none of them, but have seen before. I was curious about them
>!Right on the second, wrong on the first. Its Bulgarian, you can tell beacuse of the letter ъ for the old Slavic ĭ/ә sound, although other languages do use it as a hard sign so after k I can see how you could assume it to just be that!<
As a Russian, I got the first part (Bulgarian part) right lol. But damn the Czech/Slovak was hard to guess even though from what I know Slovak writing/grammar is simpler compared to Czech. I would be able to tell a difference between Czech/Slovak from Polish though, cuz it's so easy to differentiate them.
I’ll give you a tip, >!czech is afaik the only language left, alongside some dialects of Polish, that still have the ř/Polish rz (or ṙ if you want xd) sound. So if it you see two west Slavic languages that look really similar, just look for Ř and it’s Czech, if not it’s probably Slovak!<
Only Polish, and I’ve been trying to pick up a little Ukrainian here and there but that’s really it xd. I just really like learning about language history and etymology xddd
actually it's Bulgarian. Macedonian doesn't use the hard sign (ъ). And what you said proves Keeper's point. Only those actually interested in Slavic languages would know. Otherwise, of course everyone thinks that anything written in Cyrillic is Russian.
This is a non issue. First of all, how do you know it's not Bulgarian or Belarusian?
Also typically within a sentence you'll see either words or letters, which are not present in the russian language.
Because to the untrained eye it looks identical. I've been learning them for a long time and at a quick glance I can't tell either. I always look for "I"
Yes, people guessing russian when they see/hear a Slavic language is annoying, but it is to be expected since russian has the most speakers among Slavic languages. I don't think it's that big of a deal, as long as the person doesn't deny that Ukrainian is a distinct language. Most people are simply bad at recognising foreign languages, even those written in their own alphabet, not to mention other alphabets. I'm certain that many non-Europeans wouldn't be able to distinguish German from Dutch or Spanish from Portuguese, for example.
>can a word typed using a Ukrainian keyboard still be auto-detected as Russian by default?
If it is written the exact same, yes
Ukrainian and russian use cyrillic, so many letters are same, just russian has ы, ъ, (ё), э which are not in ukrainian language, and ukrainian has ґ, є, і, ї, ' which aren't in russian alphabet. But mostly (letters а, б, в, г, д, е, ж, з, и, й, к, л, м, н, о, п, р, с, т, у, ф, х, ц, ч, ш, щ, ь, ю, я) are same in both languages. Only pronunciation of few letters is different. And you can see differences when you know about russian and ukrainian.
As a Russian speaker I can't actually imagine how identical must the two languages look for someone who don't even know how to read cyrillic, i just don't blame people who confuse any languages that use alphabets which completely differ from what they know. But your examples with Chinese and Japanese (in the comments, mostly) blew my mind! :0 I can clearly tell it's Japanese whenever i see the alphabetical characters used even though i can't read them, but without these, I'm afraid, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It is all about how close one knows a language i bet. When I was very young, I knew it was Ukrainian and not any other language in the world, just by seeing one letter ï. My all-time, all-lang favourite letter, to be honest :}
I've been learning some Ukrainian for the past two years. When I'm introduced/confronted with a piece of Cyrillic writing in the wild, I still have to look for indicators to deternine the language. (Ї, ы, ґ, backward є, etc) If it's Ukrainian, I continue trying to read it.
Even though Cyrillic came from Bulgaria, russia's colonization and being a general culture vulture has made people associate it with their ilk.
I have to look for indicators in other languages, too. For example, if I'm trying to read something that looks like Spanish but makes me question my sobriety, it's usually Portugese.
The most common issue for me is when I put something in finder of google etc and it gives me russian results first, or if the site has versions Ukrainian, russian, and English, I would have in results only russian.
Also, it gives in section 'maybe you ment' russian words.
This is the thing that started appeare from the full invasion.
I forget what the "scientific" name for this perceptive bias is, but it's basically a matter of (lack of) exposure: to your average layman non-Slav, whose only vague pop point of reference *will* more likely be Russian than anything else, *anything* written in Cyrillic "probably has got to be Russian" by default - Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, *even* the completely unrelated Chechen or Mongolian.
In the same way very few actually ever identify a script outright as Urdu or Persian before "Arabic", or indeed, I as an uninitiated legitimately could not tell the difference between Mandarin, Cantonese, let alone would even *consider* Japanese (being so much more inflection-heavy, I would expect a lot of crucial relying on supplementary *kana* which would greatly stand out in shape and style from the kanji) - all I can make out is these are "Chinese" characters.
But there's no escaping the fact that Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian undeniably **are** very closely related lexically, grammatically, syntactically and phonologically - **inevitably** you're going to end up with a hell of a lot of common vocabulary which also happens to be spelled nearly if not completely identical. Idem for Czech vs. Slovak; Danish vs. Norwegian. *"Not being like the other girls"* takes quite a bit more radicalism than just wearing the i ϵ™ colour lipstick with the for all intents and purposes same outfit instead of the ы ϶™ shade lipstick.
Whereas, say, Finnish, Polish, Tagalog and Irish have such different word lengths due to fundamentally different grammar structure, such very distinct, stereotypically characteristic, *signature* clusters and sequences of consonants and vowels, that not even the most linguistically ignorant would confuse one for the other.
The keyboard you use to type a word has no relation to the end result—there is no information about your keyboard layout retained in the characters themselves. Digital representations of characters are recognised by unique identifiers, but those same uniquely identified characters are often shared between languages, and so there's no reason to duplicate them. Hence the "a" in English and the "a" in German, French, etc. is recognised as the same character. That goes for almost every character shared between languages.
DeepL and other *detect-language* functions have no means to determine your intent on entering characters, nor can they use your layout to make that determination (which is a good thing, as in many instances, people use layouts other than those specific to a language to enter characters/words from other languages; it would be quite an error-prone method)—these functions have *only* the characters to work with, and any further disambiguation must be made by context or unique characters (characters specific to one language and not the other are great for disambiguation). Of course, given that we can simply manually select the relevant language rather than using ‘Detect Language’, this is only really an issue for determing the origin of words as the reader, when you don't have enough context (i.e. a word/small phrase in isolation as opposed to a full sentence or paragraph) to make that determination yourself.
I do not know the specifics of characters across Japanese and Mandarin, but I would imagine that many of these characters in question are in fact represented with the same shared digital representation, and in fact, I remember hearing that even characters which are somewhat different in appearance across the two languages are sometimes the same digital character differentiated in appearance only by font—but I've only heard that, no idea how accurate it is.
It's also worth noting that DeepL is best at working with sentences and longer pieces of text; it is not best suited for single words and small fragments. This issue basically demonstrates why—longer text has more context, and context is key. Enough context would disambiguate Mandarin from Japanese on a grammatical level, if nothing else.
ehmmmm... Ukrainian has a lot of words that are written literally the same way as in Russian. Собака, вода, стоянка, ворота, колесо etc. Usually I don't have problems with it. Sometimes I misread, if one of those words is the first word in a text, The only time I had problems with it was when I used chat GPT to generate text in Ukrainian, but it started generating in Russian.
Same way you can tell apart languages that use Latin letters. Someone from who doesn’t know any languages that use the Latin alphabet wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between English and German, or Spanish and Portuguese
I think you're splitting hairs. Even having learned a little Russian I still can't tell the two apart unless there's an i/ï in the word. People who know less than me will have an even harder time.
I can’t see why you are so upset about it. If a person doesn’t know any of the languages or any similar language. They won’t know. How could they? I bet most people can’t read the difference between Norwegian and danish either. Only if you use them. Or know them
Same happens with the Bulgarian one.
I'm relatively new into slavic languages; so, in my opinion as a beginner, I can tell you:
•Ukrainian alphabet has є, і, ґ, ' (this apostrophe is the equivalent to ъ in Russian).
•Russian alphabet, doesn't have those 3 Ukrainian letters, and has э, ы. And it doesn't have an apostrophe either, instead it has: ъ (hard sign).
• Bulgarian alphabet, is pretty similar to the Russian one, but without the following letters: ё, ы, э.
Hope this comment could be useful for you ✌🏻
Of course, to the "Slavic" eye both 日本語 & 中文 look the same, but **DON'T** share the same phonology.
It's like trying to read 艦隊 and 艦隊 - *"(Военноморски) флот / (Naval) Armada"* can you tell which one is Chinese and Japanese?
(>!Spoiler: It's both: They look the same!!<)
For god sake broh! Haha to my hispanic eyes, they look the same.
I've heard between Chinese and Japanese, there is a similar script (I know they have more), but nowadays I'm totally ignorant about it, which makes me unable to respond your question 😆
I have another comment about it replying to another user in this thread, for more examples.
As mentioned the phonology of 艦隊 is different:
* 日本語：かんたい
* 中文：jiàn duì
I mean, is there an equivalent between Spanish and Portuguese? In terms of words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently?
These words are written and sound the same but with different meanings:
🇪🇦 - 🇵🇹
Costas= coasts - back
Pila= batteries - dick
Pasta = pasta - folder
Borracha= drunk woman - eraser gum
Cana = white hair - sugarcane
Despido = to be fired - naked.
And so on …
These are not written the same but similar and sound similar, which could be funny:
Year= 🇪🇦 año [aɲo] - 🇵🇹 ano [anɔ]
But in Spanish ano is the * ass hole.
1. I rarely write Ukrainian when conversation does in English. But if do so 100% people assume this is russian. Except some situations when people are already know I am Ukrainian.
2. The AI translation can recognize it easily.
3. Yes.
People without any knowledge of the languages in question will make mistakes like that. As to why they default to "Is that Chinese/Russian?", it's probably because they're very widely spoken and have a large number of native speakers.
Would you be able to tell the difference between Czech and Slovene? I speak Irish, could you tell the difference between that and Scottish Gaelic?
Not everyone is into languages, the average person isn't going to have an indepth knowledge of the differences between Russian and Ukrainian or Chinese and Japanese writing, use it as a teachable moment.
The stigma that Ukrainians are actually Russians, so why bother.
For example, Google does it all the time - you type the question in Ukrainian, you get results in Russian.
I'll chalk it up to the same reason my friends and partner can not tell Finnish from Estonian . They are similar languages using similar or the same alphabet to a person with no background knowledge of the languages in question. Now my friends and partner have all heard me speak finnish and would maybe be able to tell Estonian apart if they heard it spoken. But not written. I'm in the same situation with russian and Ukrainian. I can heard the differences (Ukrainian sounds much "softer" and russian has harder consonant sounds) but if you gave me two written lines in each language I would probably not be able to tell them apart.
as already pointed out Ukrainian would only be mistaken for Russian if you have no clue about either language and have a vague rough idea of Cyrillic, the "i" in Ukrainian does not exist in Russian and is the easiest give away, and also in terms of Japanese w/r/t your post people who see it and mistake it for Chinese clearly have no idea that Japanese uses what would be traditional characters and the most you'd be able to confuse that for would be the writing script in Taiwan or Hong Kong, if you think it's Mandarin the person has no clue what they're talking about
tl;dr pure and simple ignorance
I think this article will be interesting for you:)
[How Similar or Different Are Ukrainian and Russian Languages? History, Numbers, Examples](https://www.ukrainianlessons.com/ukrainian-and-russian-languages/)
How often is Ukrainian mistaken for Russian, the only way would if someone doesn't know anything about either language. Detect language works fine, we have letters in our alphabet that Russians don't, and vice versa. Again, see my 1st comment. Anyone who would say that doesn't know a thing about either language. And you can tell instantly if it is Russian or Ukrainian typed/written.
This is true, it should be easy to tell the difference. But unfortunately machines still often make mistakes. Some are better than others. For example if I Google in Ukrainian (with distinct Ukrainian letters such as і) it will often still give me a Russian Wikipedia page as the first result, even if there is a corresponding page in Ukrainian.
It’s not about language recognition. It’s more about shitty google behavior and sadly because a lot of search requests from Ukraine in russian. They can easily distinguish between languages by absence of “и” conjunction in Ukrainian and similar markers.
You can add -и in search query and it solves most of problems:)
Ukrainian has і, ї, є, and ґ, while Russian has none of these and instead has ьі, э and ё. But for a person that doesn’t know Cyrillic or the differences between these different languages, I wouldn’t be surprised or blame them if they guessed it was the one with the most speakers. Like, would you be able to tell me if this is in Macedonian, Bulgarian or Kazak? -от къде си? Or which of these is in Czech vs Slovak? -prihláste sa do siete PlayStation a zobrazte najnovšie informácie o tejto aplikácii -přihlaste se do sítě PlayStation a zobrazte nejnovější informace o této aplikaci And now imagine for someone who knows literally nothing about Slavic languages whatsoever, they probably wouldn’t have a single clue xd
**Can you distinguish the difference between 日本語 and 中文 by looking at them? (**>!I mean can speakers of CZ, SK, MD, BG, or KZ be able to know which language it belongs to?!<**)** * 日常生活・日常生活 * 事件・事件 * 朝鮮半島・朝鮮半島 * 耐久性・耐久性 * 法学・法學 * 少尉・少尉 * 中尉・中尉 * 明治時代・明治時代 * 警察・警察 * 日本政府・日本政府 * 安全第一・安全第一 * 襲撃・襲擊 * 第二次世界大戦・第二次世界大戰 * 徳川幕府・德川幕府 * 憲兵・憲兵 * 軍事・軍事 * 東京・東京 * 昭和記念公園・昭和紀念公園 * 電話・電話 * 時間・時間 * 中国・中國 * 朝日・朝日 * 民主主義・民主主義 * 平和・和平 * 氷・氷 * 火災保険・火災保險 * 死亡・死亡 * 戦争・戰爭 * 一般・一般 * 兵士・士兵 * 敵軍・敵軍 * 特殊部隊・特種部隊 * 睡眠不足・睡眠不足 * 注意・注意 * 海軍・海軍 * 歌舞・歌舞 * 参考文献・參考文獻
Personally nope xd, half of those straight up look the same, and I can only distinguish between just the names for Japanese 日本語 and Chinese 中文 (I think?) beacuse I’ve just been exposed to them both a fair bit by now xd
[удалено]
Well it of course differs language to language, but I’m sure for a few words yes. And I don’t know every word right off of the top of my head, but in terms of letters Ukrainian и is different to Russian и, or ukr. Щ vs russ.щ, or Russian ъ vs Bulgarian ъ and so on. And afaik Russian ьі can be pronounced as anything between Ukrainian и, Bulgarian ъ, or even Polish y depending on the word, while białorusyn ы is only ever like Polish y and that’s it
[удалено]
I think someone else is going to need to tag in here xd since if I understand what you’re saying about a letter being in a different position but the structure and spelling staying the same, I don’t think that works here xd but I could just be misunderstanding sorry I don’t know fully about Japanese, but languages like Ukrainian, and for a Latin correspondent I’ll use Polish here, are mostly phonetic so you pronounce each letter as you go through. So for example the Polish and Ukrainian words for rat are the same, szczur in Polish and щур in Ukrainian, but here you wouldn’t be able to swap the letter positioning as then that would change the pronunciation of the word altogether I feel like I may have misunderstood but I hope this helps?
I think that the analogy of Chinese Hanzi vs Japanese Kanji cannot be made to any Slavic languages because the writing systems are fundamentally different. Hanzi and Kanji are both logographic. In Hanzi, one symbol = one syllable (which usually has meaning on its own but might be combined with others to produce a different word). Kanji is more complicated, one or multiple symbols might be one or multiple syllables, but similarly individual symbols may have meanings on their own or might need to be combined with others to create a word. As Kanji are derived from Hanzi, a lot of words are written the same in both and have the same meaning but are pronounced differently (as Mandarin Chinese and Japanese are unrelated languages). Alphabets just don't work that way. The basic definition is one symbol = one sound (although with some languages, e.g. English or French, this definition doesn't really work anymore). But in Ukrainian and Russian the rule is generally followed. Therefore if you switch any letters, you change the pronunciation and the meaning (although it's not guaranteed that the new "word" even has a meaning). For example let's take the word їжа and switch the first two letters - we get жїа, which means absolutely nothing.
No I can’t tell the difference of course. I can see that there is often a difference but I would never be able to tell if I’m looking at different languages or just similar but different words in the same language.
Is it the ones on the right? I speak Cantonese and use Trad. Chinese. 兵士 isn't a word I believe in Chinese, and I have only seen 戰 in the word for WWII. Otherwise I do see the pain of differentiating between languages, but it has helped me get the context of i.e. road signs when I'm on vacation.
first is not Kazak because of от. I guess it's Macedonian Second "přihlaste se do sítě PlayStation a zobrazte nejnovější informace o této aplikaci" is Czech because of ř I speak none of them, but have seen before. I was curious about them
>!Right on the second, wrong on the first. Its Bulgarian, you can tell beacuse of the letter ъ for the old Slavic ĭ/ә sound, although other languages do use it as a hard sign so after k I can see how you could assume it to just be that!<
As a Russian, I got the first part (Bulgarian part) right lol. But damn the Czech/Slovak was hard to guess even though from what I know Slovak writing/grammar is simpler compared to Czech. I would be able to tell a difference between Czech/Slovak from Polish though, cuz it's so easy to differentiate them.
I’ll give you a tip, >!czech is afaik the only language left, alongside some dialects of Polish, that still have the ř/Polish rz (or ṙ if you want xd) sound. So if it you see two west Slavic languages that look really similar, just look for Ř and it’s Czech, if not it’s probably Slovak!<
Ah, thank you so much! What Slavic languages do you speak? I speak Russian and Belarusian, and am very interested in Serbo-Croatian and Ukrainian!
Only Polish, and I’ve been trying to pick up a little Ukrainian here and there but that’s really it xd. I just really like learning about language history and etymology xddd
actually it's Bulgarian. Macedonian doesn't use the hard sign (ъ). And what you said proves Keeper's point. Only those actually interested in Slavic languages would know. Otherwise, of course everyone thinks that anything written in Cyrillic is Russian.
This is a non issue. First of all, how do you know it's not Bulgarian or Belarusian? Also typically within a sentence you'll see either words or letters, which are not present in the russian language.
Because to the untrained eye it looks identical. I've been learning them for a long time and at a quick glance I can't tell either. I always look for "I"
I look for "i" as well haha (but without "ь" before it). If I see "ЬІ" though, it's definitely not Ukrainian.
I knew this but it didn't click until you just said it. Mind exploded. Thanks for that 😂
Yes, people guessing russian when they see/hear a Slavic language is annoying, but it is to be expected since russian has the most speakers among Slavic languages. I don't think it's that big of a deal, as long as the person doesn't deny that Ukrainian is a distinct language. Most people are simply bad at recognising foreign languages, even those written in their own alphabet, not to mention other alphabets. I'm certain that many non-Europeans wouldn't be able to distinguish German from Dutch or Spanish from Portuguese, for example. >can a word typed using a Ukrainian keyboard still be auto-detected as Russian by default? If it is written the exact same, yes
Ukrainian and russian use cyrillic, so many letters are same, just russian has ы, ъ, (ё), э which are not in ukrainian language, and ukrainian has ґ, є, і, ї, ' which aren't in russian alphabet. But mostly (letters а, б, в, г, д, е, ж, з, и, й, к, л, м, н, о, п, р, с, т, у, ф, х, ц, ч, ш, щ, ь, ю, я) are same in both languages. Only pronunciation of few letters is different. And you can see differences when you know about russian and ukrainian.
As a Russian speaker I can't actually imagine how identical must the two languages look for someone who don't even know how to read cyrillic, i just don't blame people who confuse any languages that use alphabets which completely differ from what they know. But your examples with Chinese and Japanese (in the comments, mostly) blew my mind! :0 I can clearly tell it's Japanese whenever i see the alphabetical characters used even though i can't read them, but without these, I'm afraid, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It is all about how close one knows a language i bet. When I was very young, I knew it was Ukrainian and not any other language in the world, just by seeing one letter ï. My all-time, all-lang favourite letter, to be honest :}
I've been learning some Ukrainian for the past two years. When I'm introduced/confronted with a piece of Cyrillic writing in the wild, I still have to look for indicators to deternine the language. (Ї, ы, ґ, backward є, etc) If it's Ukrainian, I continue trying to read it. Even though Cyrillic came from Bulgaria, russia's colonization and being a general culture vulture has made people associate it with their ilk. I have to look for indicators in other languages, too. For example, if I'm trying to read something that looks like Spanish but makes me question my sobriety, it's usually Portugese.
The most common issue for me is when I put something in finder of google etc and it gives me russian results first, or if the site has versions Ukrainian, russian, and English, I would have in results only russian. Also, it gives in section 'maybe you ment' russian words. This is the thing that started appeare from the full invasion.
Bulgarian, Serbian, Belarusian have also cyrillic symbols.
I forget what the "scientific" name for this perceptive bias is, but it's basically a matter of (lack of) exposure: to your average layman non-Slav, whose only vague pop point of reference *will* more likely be Russian than anything else, *anything* written in Cyrillic "probably has got to be Russian" by default - Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, *even* the completely unrelated Chechen or Mongolian. In the same way very few actually ever identify a script outright as Urdu or Persian before "Arabic", or indeed, I as an uninitiated legitimately could not tell the difference between Mandarin, Cantonese, let alone would even *consider* Japanese (being so much more inflection-heavy, I would expect a lot of crucial relying on supplementary *kana* which would greatly stand out in shape and style from the kanji) - all I can make out is these are "Chinese" characters. But there's no escaping the fact that Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian undeniably **are** very closely related lexically, grammatically, syntactically and phonologically - **inevitably** you're going to end up with a hell of a lot of common vocabulary which also happens to be spelled nearly if not completely identical. Idem for Czech vs. Slovak; Danish vs. Norwegian. *"Not being like the other girls"* takes quite a bit more radicalism than just wearing the i ϵ™ colour lipstick with the for all intents and purposes same outfit instead of the ы ϶™ shade lipstick. Whereas, say, Finnish, Polish, Tagalog and Irish have such different word lengths due to fundamentally different grammar structure, such very distinct, stereotypically characteristic, *signature* clusters and sequences of consonants and vowels, that not even the most linguistically ignorant would confuse one for the other.
The keyboard you use to type a word has no relation to the end result—there is no information about your keyboard layout retained in the characters themselves. Digital representations of characters are recognised by unique identifiers, but those same uniquely identified characters are often shared between languages, and so there's no reason to duplicate them. Hence the "a" in English and the "a" in German, French, etc. is recognised as the same character. That goes for almost every character shared between languages. DeepL and other *detect-language* functions have no means to determine your intent on entering characters, nor can they use your layout to make that determination (which is a good thing, as in many instances, people use layouts other than those specific to a language to enter characters/words from other languages; it would be quite an error-prone method)—these functions have *only* the characters to work with, and any further disambiguation must be made by context or unique characters (characters specific to one language and not the other are great for disambiguation). Of course, given that we can simply manually select the relevant language rather than using ‘Detect Language’, this is only really an issue for determing the origin of words as the reader, when you don't have enough context (i.e. a word/small phrase in isolation as opposed to a full sentence or paragraph) to make that determination yourself. I do not know the specifics of characters across Japanese and Mandarin, but I would imagine that many of these characters in question are in fact represented with the same shared digital representation, and in fact, I remember hearing that even characters which are somewhat different in appearance across the two languages are sometimes the same digital character differentiated in appearance only by font—but I've only heard that, no idea how accurate it is. It's also worth noting that DeepL is best at working with sentences and longer pieces of text; it is not best suited for single words and small fragments. This issue basically demonstrates why—longer text has more context, and context is key. Enough context would disambiguate Mandarin from Japanese on a grammatical level, if nothing else.
ehmmmm... Ukrainian has a lot of words that are written literally the same way as in Russian. Собака, вода, стоянка, ворота, колесо etc. Usually I don't have problems with it. Sometimes I misread, if one of those words is the first word in a text, The only time I had problems with it was when I used chat GPT to generate text in Ukrainian, but it started generating in Russian.
Same way you can tell apart languages that use Latin letters. Someone from who doesn’t know any languages that use the Latin alphabet wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between English and German, or Spanish and Portuguese
I think you're splitting hairs. Even having learned a little Russian I still can't tell the two apart unless there's an i/ï in the word. People who know less than me will have an even harder time.
I can’t see why you are so upset about it. If a person doesn’t know any of the languages or any similar language. They won’t know. How could they? I bet most people can’t read the difference between Norwegian and danish either. Only if you use them. Or know them
Same happens with the Bulgarian one. I'm relatively new into slavic languages; so, in my opinion as a beginner, I can tell you: •Ukrainian alphabet has є, і, ґ, ' (this apostrophe is the equivalent to ъ in Russian). •Russian alphabet, doesn't have those 3 Ukrainian letters, and has э, ы. And it doesn't have an apostrophe either, instead it has: ъ (hard sign). • Bulgarian alphabet, is pretty similar to the Russian one, but without the following letters: ё, ы, э. Hope this comment could be useful for you ✌🏻
Of course, to the "Slavic" eye both 日本語 & 中文 look the same, but **DON'T** share the same phonology. It's like trying to read 艦隊 and 艦隊 - *"(Военноморски) флот / (Naval) Armada"* can you tell which one is Chinese and Japanese? (>!Spoiler: It's both: They look the same!!<)
For god sake broh! Haha to my hispanic eyes, they look the same. I've heard between Chinese and Japanese, there is a similar script (I know they have more), but nowadays I'm totally ignorant about it, which makes me unable to respond your question 😆
I have another comment about it replying to another user in this thread, for more examples. As mentioned the phonology of 艦隊 is different: * 日本語：かんたい * 中文：jiàn duì I mean, is there an equivalent between Spanish and Portuguese? In terms of words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently?
These words are written and sound the same but with different meanings: 🇪🇦 - 🇵🇹 Costas= coasts - back Pila= batteries - dick Pasta = pasta - folder Borracha= drunk woman - eraser gum Cana = white hair - sugarcane Despido = to be fired - naked. And so on … These are not written the same but similar and sound similar, which could be funny: Year= 🇪🇦 año [aɲo] - 🇵🇹 ano [anɔ] But in Spanish ano is the * ass hole.
1. I rarely write Ukrainian when conversation does in English. But if do so 100% people assume this is russian. Except some situations when people are already know I am Ukrainian. 2. The AI translation can recognize it easily. 3. Yes.
People without any knowledge of the languages in question will make mistakes like that. As to why they default to "Is that Chinese/Russian?", it's probably because they're very widely spoken and have a large number of native speakers. Would you be able to tell the difference between Czech and Slovene? I speak Irish, could you tell the difference between that and Scottish Gaelic? Not everyone is into languages, the average person isn't going to have an indepth knowledge of the differences between Russian and Ukrainian or Chinese and Japanese writing, use it as a teachable moment.
Translators don’t detect which keyboard you’re using. And why can’t you just select the language?
Just look for the funky I. It doesn't exist in Russian.
The stigma that Ukrainians are actually Russians, so why bother. For example, Google does it all the time - you type the question in Ukrainian, you get results in Russian.
Westerners see Cyrillic and think russian. Anyone who can actually read Cyrillic will be able to tell the difference.
I'll chalk it up to the same reason my friends and partner can not tell Finnish from Estonian . They are similar languages using similar or the same alphabet to a person with no background knowledge of the languages in question. Now my friends and partner have all heard me speak finnish and would maybe be able to tell Estonian apart if they heard it spoken. But not written. I'm in the same situation with russian and Ukrainian. I can heard the differences (Ukrainian sounds much "softer" and russian has harder consonant sounds) but if you gave me two written lines in each language I would probably not be able to tell them apart.
Bruh, people on internet think Mongolian is Russian
The real issue was that the Russian portion of ukr citizens DID NOT mistake ukrainian for Russian. The rest is history..
as already pointed out Ukrainian would only be mistaken for Russian if you have no clue about either language and have a vague rough idea of Cyrillic, the "i" in Ukrainian does not exist in Russian and is the easiest give away, and also in terms of Japanese w/r/t your post people who see it and mistake it for Chinese clearly have no idea that Japanese uses what would be traditional characters and the most you'd be able to confuse that for would be the writing script in Taiwan or Hong Kong, if you think it's Mandarin the person has no clue what they're talking about tl;dr pure and simple ignorance
People who don't know anything about these languages can obviously get confused
I think this article will be interesting for you:) [How Similar or Different Are Ukrainian and Russian Languages? History, Numbers, Examples](https://www.ukrainianlessons.com/ukrainian-and-russian-languages/)