Category talk:Pages to Review Language

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Revision as of 13:30, 19 February 2007 by 217.43.38.13 (talk) (The accented characters in a text are sometimes a useful clue to identifying the possible language of the text.)
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Sometimes one can try to narrow down the choice of which language some text is in from observing which accented characters are used. For example, an a tilde character is used in Portuguese yet not in Spanish and an n tilde character is used in Spanish yet not in Portuguese, so looking for the a tilde character and the n tilde character is a way to distinguish between Portuguese and Spanish. Portuguese also has an o tilde, yet so does Estonian.

The following web page has links to lots of pdf files, each of which shows the characters needed for one of the languages of Europe: the links are about half-way down the page at section 1.2.2 Alphabetic index of languages.

http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/

The information in a particular pdf does not permit one to say that some text is written in a particular language, only that it might be in that language or that it is not in that language, yet those can be very useful conclusions to be able to deduce.