I had bought what I thought was fish (breaded, fried, frozen, like fish nuggets) and cooked it. It was rather good, and as I examined the package I noticed that part of its description transliterates in "calmar" and there was a picture of a squid on it. Well, calamari is squid meat. I was more curious now about exactly what it was, but I wasn't in the mood for the painstakingly slow process of trying to type the package's words in Russian and then using google translate. The package had descriptions in multiple languages, like every product you buy here, but only one was using the Latin alphabet. I wasn't sure what country or language "MD" was. So I copied some of what it said and then tried to find a program that could tell me what language it was in, so I could then use google translate.
This was harder than it sounds. One program concluded that it wasn't sure, maybe it was a mix of French and Romanian? Finally, another program gave me a more definite answer of Romanian. This seemed to be the correct, as google translate was then able to do a decent job of translating from Romanian into English. Nothing special about the ingredients or directions, and it was definitely squid.
Don't think I've ever come across the Romanian language before. It's amazing the obscure languages I come across here. Wonder if MD stands for Moldova?
MD is Moldova. Moldova used to be part of Romania and then the USSR. Now, of course, it's independent. According to Wikipedia, "The language spoken in Moldova is identical to Romanian, sharing the same literary standard, but for political reasons both names Moldovan and Romanian are used inside the country." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language)
ReplyDeleteIt is a Romance language so that's why calmar and calamari are similar.
I enjoy your blog. I'm a teacher in San Francisco considering teaching in international schools.