Food or games?

[redbird]

After putting together the toy in my Kinder Egg, using instructions entirely in pictograms, I found that I had something whose purpose is to fall off the edge of the table: and it isn't even very good at it.

However, we had fun identifying the languages on the warning label: having gone effortlessly from English through español and Polska, and been briefly sidetracked by Hungarian on the way to Hrvatska*, I faltered at MK (in Cyrillic) (Macedonian, maybe?) before coming up triumphantly at Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

Then I noticed the real oddity: not the inclusion of Romanian and Russian, but the absence of French, Italian, German, and all the Scandinavian languages. Do they sell no kinder eggs in Scandinavia? How many are they selling in Bulgaria?

Still, it's a lot better than the alleged toys that come in Cracker Jacks these days.

*Croatian

Comments

[thette.livejournal.com]

I can imagine there's a East European and a West European distribution.

Shall I buy one and check?

[redbird]

My guess is that I got the "Eastern Europe and the Americas" distribution (there was an Argentinian manufacturer address) and that they coded English as "UK" without thinking. The omissions of French and Portuguese are a puzzle, though. They may have forgotten about Brazil, or not gotten into that market, and be handling the French bits of the Americas as part of France (which, of course, they are politically). I don't know how they forgot about French-speaking Canada, though.

For our next trick, Kriol and Guaraní.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Magyar?

[redbird]

Magyar appears to have been labeled H, for Hungarian.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Except sometimes if the quote is really short, I can tell just about every Latin-alphabet European language apart by looking at it. Given a sufficiently long quote I can even tell Czech from Slovak, though I read not a word of either one.

I can also tell Chinese from Japanese from Korean, though I don't read any of them either.

But one Cyrillic language from another? Not a chance. I can read Cyrillic OK, the way I'd read a Latin-alphabet language I don't speak, and I even know a few words of Russian, but I can't tell the languages apart by looking at them.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

The languages written in Cyrillic don't all use quite the same alphabets; I think there's an I in Ukrainian, and a J in whichever of the Balkan languages is written in Cyrillic.

Bulgarian reads as if you're trying to read Russian but have forgotten how Russian word-endings work; I can recognise it that way with only a little Russian, but I'm not sure otherwise.

It's only the same level as recognising Spanish by the N-tilde and the upside-down question-marks, French by the accents, Czech by the haceks, German by the esstzet, but I believe it works.

[redbird]

I can puzzle out bits of Cyrillic--knowing the Greek as well as the Latin alphabet helps--and one of the words/roots I recognize is the Russian for "Russian", in part because I've seen it on newsstands so often: one of our local papers is the "New Russian Voice" (Novoe Russkye Slovo, transliterating very roughly and from memory). (I think the last word is "voice", but I may have been misinformed, or be misremembering.) And the Russian bit of this page is labeled with the full word "Russia", not just the shorthand of E or UK or PL.

[ala-too.livejournal.com]

There seem to be a variety of different runs of instructions (and one would assume manufacturing) for them. The German ones I've seen have most of the languages you are missing on yours.

[ailbhe]

Now you mention it, I haven't seen many Kinder Eggs in Swedish shops and supermarkets. But I don't know what languages are on them in the UK because I haven't bought a Nestle product for years.