Create universal numbers by comparing the edit distance between all numbers from Wikitravel's phrasebooks and for each picking the 'median' one. As a side effect, create a tree an evolutionary tree.
Create universal numbers by comparing the edit distance between all numbers from Wikitravel's phrasebooks and for each picking the 'median' one. As a side effect, create a tree an evolutionary tree.
Here are the universal numbers and the languages they come from. Learn to count this way and you have the highest chance to be understood if you are talking to a random person (admittedly still not a very high chance, but still).
You can find the code on https://github.com/DOsinga/universal_numbers
As a side effect of comparing all languages with all languages, we also end up with a distance matrix for language to language. We can easily create a tree out of this:
You can read more about this on the corresponding blog post.