According to Google, I speak Slovak

[ki4jgt]

I switched facebook's default to Esperanto and now, every page I visit in facebook, Google Chrome asks if I want to translate it from Slovak to English. Great job Google.

[Erik1984]

Google knows best, you probably are Slovakian ;)

[Legendary_Bibo]

I use 1337.

[Paqman]

Great job Google.

Wow, they knew you spoke Slovak even before you did. Spooky!

[ninjaaron]

I switched facebook's default to Esperanto [...]

Why am I not surprised?

[whatthefunk]

If google tells you you speak slovak, you better start studying.

Or...

What region is you computer set to? Do you accept cookies from google? Do you login to google with a facebook account or something similar?

[sffvba[e0rt]

The all powerful Google knows all, sees all...


404

[AllenGG]

So, 4 oh 4 that leads to the big question:
Has go-o-o-o-o-o-o-ogle become infinitely too large ?

We all use it. many of us use "the cloud version" , so mabe I really do speak Croation ???
Pero ¿por qué cambiar cosas?

[ki4jgt]

If google tells you you speak slovak, you better start studying.

Or...

What region is you computer set to? Do you accept cookies from google? Do you login to google with a facebook account or something similar?

My region is the USA and language is English. Google Chrome keeps trying to translate FB for me. It's not "Hey, you're on Google now, let me give you the correct version of our page." It's "You're on Facebook and we don't recognize your language, so we're gonna guess you speak Slovak." I know they don't offer Esperanto translations, but they could at least build in triggers which tell Google Chrome that it's an actual language and I don't need it translated :-(

[BeRoot ReBoot]

I switched facebook's default to Esperanto and now, every page I visit in facebook, Google Chrome asks if I want to translate it from Slovak to English. Great job Google.

If you're going to use a useless constructed language, at least learn one with actual geek cred like Lojban, Klingon or Quenya.

[ki4jgt]

If you're going to use a useless constructed language, at least learn one with actual geek cred like Lojban, Klingon or Quenya.

I like Esperanto thanks though. It's latin base allows me to learn it faster.

[whatthefunk]

I like Esperanto thanks though. It's latin base allows me to learn it faster.

And then you can go to Esperantistan and meet all the locals?

Oh, and there must be some way to turn off translations in Chrome...

[ki4jgt]

There is, but I frequently use it for other languages. I've tried the don't translate for slovak option, but then it ask me if I want to translate from some other language when I visit another Esperanto page.

[smellyman]

Google knows more about you than you know of yourself.

[ninjaaron]

It is sort of interesting that this happened, since The creator of Esperanto was a native speaker of another Slavic language.

I'd like to think that there is something about the structure or phonetics of the language that Google recognises and finds comparable to Slovak, but I sort of doubt that. Must be the fact that the caron diacritic is used almost exclusively in the southern Slovakian languages (well, also Turkish and a few other Asian languages that have adopted Latinized alphabets... and the scientific transcriptions of certain sounds in languages that use different writing systems).

As admittedly lame as it is, I can't quite stop harbouring this secret fascination with Esperanto as the most widely spoken synthetic language in the world. There are some interesting things going on there from a linguistic perspective.

(and nobody come in here and say that modern Hebrew is a synthetic language. It's made of real Hebrew and Aramaic works and real grammar from Yiddish. It actually has an unbroken chain of literary history dating back ~1000BC, even though it ceased to have native speakers for around 1700 years)