hellothousand loading… —

hellothousand

Hawaiian, Czech and Arabic share no ancestor and no continent. They open the same way anyway. That greeting is column one of twelve. The rest run from thanks through the toast to the two words at the bottom of a letter.

Flags are for countries

Languages don't respect borders. Each row takes one flag plus up to three more: English gets the US, Australia and Canada. Arabic flies the Arab League flag, since no one state owns it. Three is still too few. Spanish is official in twenty countries. Quechua flies the wiphala, Esperanto its green star. Neither has a country.

The casual form won

German has Wie geht es Ihnen? and Was geht?. This poster prints Was geht?. Same choice in Turkish, in Japanese, and everywhere else that keeps a polite form. A few entries are local: ¿Qué onda? is Mexican, Foi mal is Brazilian, 好正 is Hong Kong.

Two lines per cell

The top line is what you'd say out loud. The native script sits under it. Latin-script rows get one line, since the spelling is the pronunciation. Romanisations are reading aids, not ISO transliteration. Tone marks appear for Mandarin, Thai and Cantonese only. Speaker counts are native plus second-language, rounded hard.

The row that's drawn

ASL has a grammar of its own and no written form, so its row is drawn rather than spelled. The hand is the shape; the red mark is the movement, which is half of any sign and all of some. The caps underneath are glosses — how you write about a sign, not how anyone writes ASL. Two cells are honest guesses: no settled casual sign exists for a toast, and letters don't sign off.

hello
thousand
24 × 36 in