A bunch of GeoGuessr streamers I watch can't tell the difference between Bangla and Sinhala/Tamil and basically do a 50-50 coin toss when it comes to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. I look forward to them being even more befuddled by all the Devanagari variants.
Bangla, Sinhala and Tamil have distinct scripts. Bangla script is similar to Devanagari script in the sense that you have the topline (overbar a.k.a. Shirorekha, literally headline). Sinhala does not have that.
Tamil is a completely distinct script.
Tamil is used in signs/boards in several southasian countries (Southern state of Tamilnadu and other southern states, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore). Particularly in Sri Lanka, due to its official language status, it is possible to to lead to ambiguity in GeoGuessr between India and Sri Lanka. Contextual clues can generally rule out Malaysia and Singapore. So, I can understand the ambiguity between Sri Lankan Tamil and Tamil used in India at script level, but Bangla and Tamil have such distinct scripts that there are simple heuristics you can use to disambiguate.
Really? I feel like these two in written form are pretty different, and I don't have any real knowledge of South Asian languages.
Personally I feel Thai and Lao are harder to tell apart (I've resorted to: Lao is more curvy, Thai uses more straight lines), and also how to tell apart Czech from Slovakian, or Danish from other Nordic languages. Of course there are other ways to tell where you are, and if you only rely on written language you will not become a great player.
I'd watch GeoRainbolt[1] and all the pros that play in his tournaments.
How did you end up telling apart Danish from “other Nordic languages”?
It’s quite trivial as a layman American who has lived in Scandinavia to tell Danish apart for Swedish (one immediate dead giveaway is usage of ø in Danish vs ö in Swedish). But apparently Danish and Norwegian in written form are almost indistinguishable, so reliance on cultural usage of words must be necessary
Norwegian has the diphthongs "ei" and "øy", while Danish has "ej" and "øj". Though I don't know whether you can rely on that when looking at proper names (surnames, place names).
Yes, it's funny. It ought to be trivial to differentiate between Bangla and Sinhala/Tamil because Bangla has the top horizontal line joining letters of a word whereas Sinhala/Tamil have the round jalebi-like letters. But somehow the streamers always forget about it.
(They're busy commentating, and they're not dedicated GeoGuessr streamers. It's understandable.)
But even if they could, it will still be harder when it comes time to differentiate between Hindi / Gujarati / Marathi / Bangla etc, which is why I'm looking forward to it.
Not really, I'm slightly above average but outclassed by many geoguessrs. And it is useless since I'll most likely never use this knowledge outside of geoguessr.
My point is that watching a geoguessr player who doesn't know how to interpret street signs is like watching a chess streamer who doesn't know about en passant. I guess if you're watching them for their humorous commentary or their cleavage, that's cool, but it hopefully is not because you think they're good players.
I could say the same about your first message in this conversation. You don't seem to be concerned with them viewing good players and seem more concerned about appearing better than.
