Maltese isn’t an Arabic dialect. Yes, the grammar and phonology and core function words derive from Arabic, but more than half of the vocabulary comes from Italian/Sicilian-North African Arabic may borrow a few words from Italian here and there (just like English does), but not >50% of their vocabulary.

Oh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)?

Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.

It's not at all far removed from the North African dialects of arabic which is the dialect that it's derived from. Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.

To be fair to the Frisians, there are around 40,000-80,000 native Irish speakers and 500,000+ native Frisian speakers.

So same as Esperanto then.

Not only on the language but also in gastronomy and architecture. When I see old towns in UK I usually think about Dutch towns but just without any biking infrastructure.

> However modern standard Dutch (Nederlands, Hollands) is based upon Franconian, rather than Saxon dialects.

> Some of these [Old Saxon] speakers took part in the Germanic conquest of England in the fifth century AD. While it is not true that English and Plattdeutsch derive completely from the same source, the Old Saxon input into Anglo-Saxon was of primary importance and this linguistic group contributed greatly to the Anglo-Saxon dialects which our English forefathers spoke.

[1]: http://www.plattmaster.de/plattoew.htm

If you've ever read anything written in old English, it's a even closer to Dutch.

That’s because all those languages are all essentially rooted in the languages/dialects of the Germanic tribes. It is why the Dutch get their English name from the German for German, Deutsch; and Nederland (Neder = Low) is German/Dutch for the Lowland Deutsch.

I’m sure everyone is aware that English comes from Anglish, i.e., the Angles as in the Germanic tribe.

Deutsch is derived from proto-germanic (as best we can tell) þiudiskaz, meaning “the people” i.e., the group of the different self associating tribes. It gets far more interesting in that it seems many of the strong dialects of especially southern Germany, Austria, and England have in fact retained some very old words and pronunciations that were lost in more standardized, conformed, and perverted dialects.

Well, this was 4 days ago, Spain in talks with Germany regarding the addition of official languages:

https://www.politico.eu/article/catalan-basque-galician-boos...

They could get Austria to do it, as it presumably has a spare slot.

Including the nasty political side-show that is Ulster Scots - literally only brought in as a chilling effect 'whataboutism' to diminish support when Irish speakers ask for language rights in Northern Ireland.

https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1fivtob/no...

Is English a legacy official language then from the time the UK was a member (I‘m guessing Ireland nominated Irish instead of English). Aside it feels very un-EU to push this limitation, as I was under the assumption that EU was all about celebrating (European) diversity.

Haha I just added it as a fun fact, I don't actually believe folks will need to start retraining things, or that this is likely to be at the top of the priorities list for anyone. Party programmes are aspirational anyway.

Oops, accidentally made the model speak Limburgish.

I don't have much personal experience in attempting to communicate with arabic speakers. From others I have heard Lebanese arabic is the closest and you can have a passable conversation.

Not sure which Tunisians are claiming this but they'd definitely need a lot more than minimum effort. Maltese split off from Arabic around 1k years ago. The two languages sound pretty different, and are written with different alphabets.

Native Maltese speaker here. It is thought in schools alongside English, with both being official national languages. Most people locally, that are not foreign born or immigrants speak the language, and it is used in most households as the main language. But everyone grows up bilingual, as English is essential for most everything else that we do as a nation.

Maltese has been loaded with loan words since forever. 5 points if you can guess where bonġu, bravu and mappa come from. At some point there was some literary council for the language that decided that any new loan words should just be spelled phonetically. Computer became kompjuter.

Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.

Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.

On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.

Yes, there's plenty of Maltese spoken and listened to.

I was surprised to hear Maltese radio stations played in taxis, while visiting Malta just a few weeks back

Depends on where you live and how you were brought up, but for the most part code switching is default.

There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.

Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.

A term for that concept, by the way, is "endonym":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym

Wikipedia says it's "Malti"

'ish' is a pretty universal english suffix. So Spanish is just "españ-ish".

Read with English pronunciation, closest would be mar-sa-shlock.

Only if we have a few Maltesers first

From what I have heard, Lebanese Arabic is the closest, and still pretty far. Passable conversation is possible.

Maltese is definitely its own language. Arabic roots are there (theres a Semitic joke in there ) but it isn't arabic anymore. Its written left to right with a variant of the english alphabet.

I know that the reverse understanding isn't too bad from chatting with a Saudi-born member of staff on holiday in Malta.

I don't think anyone would seriously consider it a dialect of Arabic though with its completely different alphabet and half the vocabulary and morphology coming from Italian languages/dialects, even if Malta hadn't spent the best part of a millennium trying very hard not to become part of the Arab world

See the section "historical dispute".

I think some people get touchy about them being lumped together if their last period of commonality (per the article) was 1400 BCE. For comparison, I believe all the Slavic languages were mutually intelligible around 1200 AD. But much more recently than this, in the last few centuries, there have been notable attempts by east slavs to absorb the Baltic language cultures and deny them.

It is just one of the theories, there is no clear evidence to suggest that Baltic and Slavic were the same language thousands of years ago.

Plenty of wrong here, considering Lithuanian and Latvian are utterly unintelligible to slavs, save for loanwords, but Slavic languages between themselves retain some level of intelligibility, which even spawned two competing constructed languages.

Yup, most of Eastern Europe are Balto-Slavic. While the division from the Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Belarussian, Ukranian, etc) is distant, they are still Slavic. From Eastern Europe, only Estonian is not a Slavic language.

It's more than political. In speaking Flemish is to Dutch as UK English is to US English. In writing however there is no difference in spelling, but there is a difference in word choice.

Now, being from Belgium, even within that small part of the country where everybody is supposed to speak Dutch, I genuinely don't understand people from near the coast, which was about 150 miles from where I used to live.

Not sure that should be the qualifier, there might be more people able to speak Basque in the world than Danish, doesn't stop Danish from being well supported.

I think sentence should be easily readable to Flemish speaker: "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

Ah. That makes sense.

It's all Greek, to me...

Official is a weird concept though. Turns out Dutch law never really bothered to define an official language, Dutch simply is the de facto standard and is required for a lot of things making it effectively the standard. This makes Dutch Sign Language the only language officially recognised by law. An attempt to recognise Frysian and Dutch as official languages in the constitution failed.

Thanks. That makes sense.

In the US, people will resort to fisticuffs, over variants of Spanish. I usually translate into Castilian Spanish, because that seems to be the equivalent of "Vanilla" Spanish. No one is really happy (except the Spaniards), but I'm not accused of favoritism.

Basque is an official language and declared as such in the Spanish constitution however restricted only to the regions that decide to apply it (Basque Country and Navarra).

Much like the many names for Germany.

It's a national language in Malta, making it a popular destination for "language weeks" in European schools, where English is usually a main subject.

That said, whenever there is a language selection UI (e.g. at banking machines or institutional websites) in wider Europe that uses flags to represent languages -- probably not a good idea to start with, but very common -- the Irish tricolour should be used to indicate English rather than the UK or USA flags. (although cf Airteagal 8 of Bunreacht na hÉireann).

English at this point has stopped culturally belonging to the United Kingdom and whilst one can discus it's not so very moral way of getting there, it's become the bridge language for people of different languages to communicate in, further solidified by the internet.

this! it favors established business with legal teams and (maybe more importantly) with connections.

The EU is also great at creating a heavy regulatory environment. Which entrenches existing incumbents. So the EU creates barriers that favor big companies, then tries to fix it with grants that... also favor big companies.

And then everyone's surprised that there's no innovation in Europe.

From all the world's companies worth over 100B$ there's only one European company - SAP, founded 50 years ago. [1]

[1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora...

I took part in application for EU grants a few times and our company group did it many times over the years.

It's bureaucracy, often bordering with stupidity. You may need advisors to navigate all their forms & processes. But it certainly isn't "pals-only" type of deal.

On the other hand - is it harder than getting VC funding? For seasoned founder with reputation - probably. For fresh startup - probably not.

Of course there is red tape. EU funding comes from taxpayer money and we want it to be spent wisely. The red tape is precisely to prevent it from being funneled to pals. EU has funded quite a few free software projects so it's not like the red tape is an insurmountable burden: https://www.ri.se/en/news/blog/europes-digital-future-spells...

It's not even close to how he described it.

The root cause of that is the lack of a true Capital Market union.

In the US, you can get VC across state borders and VC can invest in any US company regardless of their location. Not in the EU.

Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible. And even if managed, now that NL investor has to repeat the entire process for Poland, Spain, Malta and other countries.

EU Made Simple explains this very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RqYws1JAuI

Yep, VCs don't exist here. Plus the absurd starting costs, it's like what, 20k to set up a GmbH?

Where in Europe and where in the US? You probably started one in the easiest US state to do so. Did you try starting one in the easiest EU state? Otherwise we already can't take things very seriously.

Secondly, what's easier besides VC funding? If it's VC funding, the disparity there has nothing to do with regulations - guess how much VC funding the non-EU rest of the world gets.

What would you want to see changed to consider coming back?

> but I started my company in the US because everything is so much easier here

Which part is easier? That you have 50 different states with slightly varying laws to consider (e.g. Californian Data protection)? That you have a byzantine system of "benefits" to choose and manage?

And compared to where? Germany or Estonia or Sweden or Spain? The complexities will vary wildly depending on the country (kind of like in the US, where lots of companies pick the state to base themselves in based on the combination of favourable laws and precedents and taxes).

One fairly large factor is that even though English is much more common today, you just can't operate (depending on the product of course) in many countries without having customer support, documentation etc in the local language.

Money.

Why work in the "europoor" countries when you can go to america and earn megabucks.

> I think it is a complete misreading to point to protectionism as the reason for Chinese success, but having a big unified domestic market for consumers along with massive saving rates and capital controls probably does help.

Capital controls are protectionist measures, but anyway, no.

> Okay, what is the limiting factor?

Let's look at which countries have a significant local software industry compared to population size.

- China

- US

- Korea

- You can argue for Japan and India but that's already starting to stretch.

- Yup, effectively no where else. Even in an "out of the way" place like Myanmar everyone uses Meta, with a nice little genocide to show for it. Sure, in Vietnam they use Zalo, and other places have a few other local players. But most of the famous US tech apps are dominant.

Is the EU the outlier here? No. Everywhere else US tech dominates. Meta, Netflix, Apple, Google, Uber, Spotify, Microsoft, Match Group, Paypal, Amazon, and on and on. They don't just dominate the EU, they dominate the world.

Except for the countries I named above, where at least some of the markets that US big tech competes in, instead have bigger local players. And even there, guess what?

Their market share is almost 1:1 linearly correlated to the degree of protectionism in those countries, all the way from China, then Korea, then India/Japan, and then everywhere else! Who woulda thought!

Why does Korea have much less US tech dominance than, say, Germany? Despite German companies theoretically having a big advantage: the German public is 100x more privacy conscious than the Korean one, and much less trusting of US companies.

I can tell you that it's not less regulations; Korea's GDPR is much more onerous than the EU's and so are investment regulations. On every single regulatory aspect, German software startups have it easier. But they were never protected. US tech was allowed to waltz in, dump their products - that's what they did, it's hilarious how now China "dumping" EVs and solar is suddenly an issue when it's exactly the strategy that US tech continues to this day; the AI companies are doing it right now! And the Korean companies were protected. Both by the rules burden, that local companies had to deal with too, along with intentional protectionism.

When it comes to solar and EVs, we all understand that a foreign country dumping their goods kills local industry. It's the exact same with software.

But then half of HN has millions on the bank exactly thanks to the above - this is where all those fat SV salaries have come from - so I do get the lack of desire to understand it.

> Okay, what is the limiting factor

A few.

A big part is that the EU is a collection of countries that (with very few exceptions) have different languages and laws. For a company to serve Spain and France, for instance, it would need to translate everything, hire local lawyers and customer support agents. Considering the much smaller size of the countries (biggest one is 70 million vs 330 million in the US), the opportunity for "unlimited" growth is limited.

This also rebounds in the fact that when an American company makes it big, they have the resources to flood other EU markets and be cheaper/better than the local competition due to economies of scale and money based on their big successful US market. A French company making it big is still small compared to a US equivalent.

Then, there's the capital markets, no denying that. The money being thrown around the US is like nowhere else on the planet. Some of it definitely a bubble / unrealistic, but that doesn't matter. But in part it's because of the size of the total potential market that this is justified.

Education / national mythology also plays a part, I think (this is pure conjecture now). In the US, the "American Dream", "everyone can make it" etc is heavily ingrained. It propagates through the world with the help of Hollywood and other American cultural exports. In most EU countries, there isn't such a heavy emphasis on independence and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". "Hustle culture" isn't a thing. So for most people, it isn't something that comes naturally to them to start a company and work 100 hour weeks to be big and rich and successful and famous.

That's not to say there aren't such people, I went to 42 and have been to Station F and know some people in that universe. A decent proportion of my classmates wanted to make their startup and make it big, and some did end up starting their own companies.

It's true that they are appointed.

However, they're appointed by the EU Council (the heads of state, most of them elected, some appointed by a national parliament), and approved by the (elected) European Parliament.

At the cost of some transparency, this does make it possible to select a bit more for management skills instead of just campaigning skills.

The Commission is appointed by elected officials. That's the same way the US presidency works. It's also how the UK PM role works, or any minister in pretty much any democratic government. All of those are still referred to as "elected" in common tongue.

I literally quoted the paragraph from this link in the tweet I provided: Edit: lol, I didn't, I quoted it from a policy document, not from press release. However, my point stands:

--- start quote ---

Apply AI Strategy

The Apply AI Strategy aims to harness AI's transformative potential by driving adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture. It will also support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with their specific needs and help Industries integrate AI into their operations.

--- end quote ---

I also quoted a paragraph from a document I will find when I'm not on mobile.

Levels literally wants to train AI Slop: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1981499900266193028

--- start quote ---

Train a foundational model for AI photos of people

--- end quote ---

But the point here isn't to fund AI research, it is to use AI to benefit concrete fields.

By funding AI slop, you're funding AI slop, not AI research, or, quote, "drive adoption of AI across strategic and public sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture"

You are wrong in that you think the hierarchies stem specifically from feudalism, but you are absolutely correct in that these hierarchies exist and are deeply entrenched. Sweden and Germany have one of the lowest percentages of self-made vs. inherited fortunes in the western world. Actually some tax policies in the US enable much more upward mobility, such as real estate taxation and 401k-like vehicles.

The problem in UK cities has nothing to do with feudalism. The massive lands most of those big land owners own isn't really worth that much. The really valuable land around cities is locked up by 1960s land use and building regulation. You have incredibly valuable land not developed because it has to be 'green' but its not some ancient woodland, rather its just a bunch of grass next to a highway.

Those 1960s regulation have a 1000x larger effect then any land owners owning a bunch of unproductive farmland or highlands.

Not to say there are no issues with large land owners, but its nowhere near anywhere close to being the issue with housing prices and living cost.

> France and there will just be massive swathes of land owned by the nobility or 'former' nobility

Yeah, no, this isn't even remotely true.

I'd use a model trained on a targeted and curated data set over one trained on all the crap on the internet any day.

Sidesteps potential legal issues probably

My first impulse is to say that some languages have better SNR on the internet. (less garbage autogenerated or SEO content compared to useful information)

The issue starts, when an LLM's transfers knowledge between languages, even though that knowledge is not correct in that language. I have seen this with e.g. ChatGPT answers regarding laws for example where it refers to US laws when asked in German, which are obviously not relevant.

You can also correctly bias your sampling so that when selecting new training instances each language is chosen equally. Generally the diversity of data is good, unless that data is "wrong" which, ironically, is probably most of the internet, but I digress.

The difference ia larger than let's say just a "dialect". They really are different languages, even though we generally understand each other quite well (younger generations less so). I've heard it's about as different as e. g. Danish and Swedish - not sure if that comparison is helpful.

>I'm going to guess that this part is intentional. Europe tends to be more aggressive in enforcing antitrust laws. Economically, Europe's goal isn't to have the biggest companies but to have more smaller companies.

So is your hypothesis that the total market cap of EU tech companies is something like 50,60,70, etc. % of total US tech marketcap? Something significantly different than the ~10% implied by that figure (largest us companies 10x largest EU companies). And it's just more broadly distributed?

Hard to find data on this but this is showing EU tech market cap at 3.2T. https://www.stateofeuropeantech.com/chapters/outcomes

Whereas this is saying the US "megacaps" ($200B+) are at 21T. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/05/tech-megacaps-worth-market-c...

Which puts the entire EU tech market at 15% of the US megacaps. Not even the entire market.

Antitrust laws are not the reasons for more smaller companies. Getting an antitrust case off in Europe is very hard, not US hard but still hard. The reasons are more complex then that.

What a weird comment.

llama-3.1-70b-versatile is pretty good at translating though

They are already CIA'ed on a regular basis for much less than that.

It's strange, my real life experience is very different than yours. Unless you're training AI to do something shady, it's really no bother at all. In fact, most of what the AI Act requires, you have to do anyway for a good model card.

Hallucinations and output quality are two different problems. Hallucinations are usually expressed in perfect sounding sentences by the LLM, that's what makes it so convincing to end users.

I live in Finland, ChatGPT is great at Finnish and far better at it than EuroLLM.

EuroLLM doesn't even beat the open source Gemma 2, and Gemma 3 is already out.

Much of the neural network work was funded by Canadian Universities, and commercialized by US companies. Even if you look just at the "Attention is all you need" paper, which is primarily by authors working at Google, most of those authors come from academia and are immigrants.

Vaswani is an Indian born computer scientist, Shazeer is US, Parmar was born in India, Uszkoreit was born in Germany, Jones was born in the UK, Gomez is British-Canadian, Kaiser is a Polish computer scientist, and Polosukhin is Ukrainian.

Almost all of these people have PhDs and Master degrees. The ROI on academia is vast for society, including European universities. The thing the US does well is capitalize on that education, and sadly also try to steal credit for it as "American exceptionalism." If Europe and other countries learn how to keep their academics and get them working in local industries, America's edge will evaporate overnight.

Oh, you'd be surprised to know what's behind many of those "conspiracies"!

Every country needs a few plumbers and carpenters whether or not they are at the forefront of technology. Some money must be spent to give academics work to do so they can sharpen up their skills and perhaps teach the next set of students who might be more commercial

You’ve got to pick one as a lingua franca. English is already popular but Spanish, French, or Esperanto would all work just fine.