We were talking, nerdily, about a fun (FSVO) thing about Norwegian and English the other day on irc (it’s a chat system that’s relayed on the Internet; it’s all the rage):
Rye (in Norwegian) means rug (in English). Rye (in English) means rug (in Norwegian). Are there other pairs of words like that?
We couldn’t think of anything, so I asked ChatGPT o1-preview:
After thinking for 50 seconds, and using more electricity than several small Latin American countries combined (probably), it said it understood the problem perfectly, and then answered with complete nonsense. So, that’s as expected.
What about Claude?
Well, it seems to “realise” that it doesn’t know anything, so I guess that’s better than just gaslighting the user.
If there’s one thing an LLM should be good at, it would be linguistic data, but nope.
How about Google, then? Well, there’s always reddit:
Let me translate:
“Turkey in English is “turkey”. Turkey in Turkish is “hindi”. Turkey in Hindi is “peru”. Peru is the country where the Aces: Iron Eagle III movie takes place, which is a film that most people consider to be a turkey.”
This is indeed quite brilliant, but not quite the same thing, either.
So does anybody know of a different pair/quad of words like rye (N)/rug (E)/rye (E)/rug (N)?
Or perhaps a longer chain involving several languages?
There must be something, surely.