Anyone interested in a statistical approach to the history of the industrial revolution should read The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 by Eric Hobsbawm. It's the first in an excellently written series on the history of the 18th century, written for the interested layperson.
An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China.
The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms:
1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái
This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun').
2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó
This form approximates the sound of the Sanskrit word using Chinese characters. It's typical of Chinese phonetic translations, which still today largely just use characters, and thus often don't sound much like the word in the original language.
To add to this, Chinese (and Japanese) Buddhist scholars' emphasis on retaining the original pronunciation of chants led them to hang on to the phonetically written Siddham script in which their masters had learned the scriptural texts in universities in India.
A classic example of this is Hindi and Urdu -- the two languages are largely mutually intelligible when spoken, which is the main criterion for being the same language, but are written with different scripts and of course used in separate and adversarial states.
Anyone interested in formants and speech synthesis should have a look at Praat[0], a marvellous piece of free software that can do all kinds of speech analysis, synthesis, and manipulation.
I don't know where the German definitions are coming from, but they shouldn't all be lowercased -- all nouns in German start with a capital letter, so "verständis", rather than "Verständis", is actually a mistake.
Unfortunately, the latter can also happen. I have used a TV in China that plays a thirty-second ad on startup almost every time, with no option to turn it off.
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