this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Google search is over (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Via @[email protected]

Right now if you search for "country in Africa that starts with the letter K":

  • DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.

  • Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.

This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:

"There are no countries in Africa that start with K." "What about Kenya?" "Kenya suck deez nuts?"

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I got the uber pedant.. "While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound. It's always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this."

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

To be entirely fair to it, that is a transliteration problem. It does make sense if it could use Swahili to write the final "K" but it can't, so it transliterates to "K".

Then again, Kenya has both Swahili and English as its official languages, so it's the kind of pedantry which is also (*sort of) incorrect.

  • sort of because if someone wants to have a rant about the evils of colonialism here, I'm gonna agree with them.
[–] murtaza64 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As far as I know, Swahili is almost always written with the latin script.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's a not universally popular colonial imposition. Hence my final comment.