Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 February 27

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February 27

What language is this?

Hi everyone,

I was driven around by a taxi driver a few months back, and he taught me how to say "thank you" in his native language.

Here are some things I know about this language:

• It is probably from Central Asia, the Caucasus, or the Middle East, given the man's physical appearance (light-skinned).
• It sounded most like an Iranian language, but I couldn't be sure. It was probably not Turkic, and definitely not Arabic.
• There was a distinct 'Ayn sound in some of the words.

The phrase for "thank you" sounded like the following:

Yırd El-Âwê.

However, this is the best I could remember from memory, so the actual phrasing might be a bit different. I am good at languages and linguistics but my memory of unfamiliar foreign language phrases is not perfect. It could have been between three and five syllables. 64.231.206.241 (talk) 18:14, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Just to see what happened, I pasted the above transcription into Google Translate. It guessed that the language was "Kurdish (Kurmanji)", but it just repeated the words on the English side, as usual when it can't translate something. And when I then asked it to translate "Thank you" from English into that language, it said "Spas dikim." So I don't think I believe that language identification. --142.112.220.50 (talk) 12:26, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Consider the possibility that the phrase does not mean "Thank you" but rather something mildly obscene or in some other way humorous. Playing such jokes on foreigners has a long history worldwide. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.126.225.254 (talk) 13:26, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

The articles Voiced pharyngeal fricative and Voiceless pharyngeal fricative list about twenty languages, each. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 19:37, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Perusing the translations given for thank you in Wiktionary, the best match seems to be from a variety of Arabic, see يعطيك العافية (pronounced /yiʕ.tˤiːk al.ʕaːf.ja/). 124.148.237.250 (talk) 11:15, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't understand the transcription of Gulf Arabic. It doesn't seem to be IPA. What would 3 signify? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:46, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

AnonMoos replied on my talk page. It's apparently Arabic chat alphabet (which however seems to be too informal and non-standardized to really be used on Wiktionary). 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:47, 1 March 2024 (UTC)