As for accents: I love all British accents (except for Scottish and Irish accents) and Russian accents.
D:
But but buttttt they are the bestttttt
Have to agree with Russian accents though. I love Russian accent in any language<3
As for accents: I love all British accents (except for Scottish and Irish accents) and Russian accents.
D:
But but buttttt they are the bestttttt
Have to agree with Russian accents though. I love Russian accent in any language<3
Depends on how you say it. When most people think of German words they imagine a Rammstein looking guy with a dead serious expression who pronounces it like an execution command.
You're right, people do imagine a typical german when they hear the language.
Question then; what is a beautiful language?
Swedish obviously:ninja:
But I think it is beautiful, listen to a song by Rajaton or something and you can't think Finnish sounds ugly or something… Well at least I think so >:
It's not ugly per se, nor is german really. But kind of like german it's rough and harsh sounding.
It can be summarized as a language that should be reserved to use when talking with soldiers and horses.
@Kairouseki:
I'm kind of the same. Except that French is the one I can't stand. I just don't see anything good whatsoever about it. I guess the hate about Danish is mostly from other Scadinavian people that can pick up on stuff Danish does, though I don't really hear it because my native language is English.
I cant belive you dont hear how horrible it sounds.
I haven't heard it spoken all that much so that might be the reason. It's kind of like French in that it has a shit-ton of silent consonants at certain points. I would like to learn it though, if only because my mother's side of the family (not sure how far back, though) is Danish. Hell, I think I have some French-Canadian in me as well but French can go fuck itself.
I AM A BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE.
Also, of course, sign languages can't understand each other.
There's a vast different set of hand signals for every culture. Italian is supposedly pretty damn expressive with using their hands as they talk as well.
It's only natural that sign languages would differ. I don't know too much of American sign language, but I do know that some words are formed while your hands are in the shapes of the alphabetic letters.
Japanese sign language obviously wouldn't use those signs as a result.
Never mind that the middle finger is apparently thank you in German signing. Unless, this is some myth.
It's a myth :D
The middle finger is 'fuck you' in Germany too.
I wish I knew where some dumb myths originated from.
I think french sounds beutiful. I like the way norweigan sounds, it sounds much happier than swedish XD. I think danish and chinese sound kind of ugly… also finnish, but swedish-finnish sounds better than swedish.
You guys have always struck me as intelligent people (if a little blunt) so I'd like to ask…
Is knowing Malay useful? At all?
I'd say no unless you live in a place that speaks it.
i think the only useful ones if going to use it for business would be spanish, german, chinese or japanese
i think those would cover the main big places that you could get upper leg for knowing english and (that language)
@Kairouseki:
I'd say no unless you live in a place that speaks it.
Well, I live in Malaysia, so I'm required to learn it.
What I'm a bothered by is how the Education Ministry here seems to think it might be a better idea to have Science and Math taught in Malay rather than English (They're still in English now, but it might not be long before they switch it back to Malay).
I speak italian, french, english, german and spanish…and I finally started learning japanese about a year ago. It's definately different from the indo-european languages and it's not that easy but it's worth it...I'd like to go to Japan next year, so I have to! Bring it on, nihongo!
I'm taking up Chinese this fall and I plan to move onto Japanese after that. I've heard that Chinese was harder to learn but I guess I'll see in a few weeks.
Chinese has tones while Japanese does not. Chinese is also written entirely with kanji while Japanese has hiragana and katakana to break it up a little. In Chinese, though, you don't have to conjugate verbs, whether that be a good or bad thing.
So I'm starting Latin for college, and I was wondering if anyone here knows the language.
Penso ergo sum .
Cool.
I always hear people say Latin is a difficult language to learn. Is that true?
Also, do you think that having 7 years worth of Spanish classes help at all or will it just lead to confusion?
Ha, I don't actually speak it, that's a fairly common quote. Anyway…
I've heard it's pretty difficult as well, but I think it's mostly the grammar. As far as I know Latin has 3 genders as well as quite a few grammatical cases. Meaning that you for the most part use the case endings instead of pre or postpositions. So saying "in something" or "for somebody" is just the word with a different ending than the original word.
I'm sure that your Spanish knowledge will help at least a little bit, and even if not, just knowing how foreign languages work will be a big helper.
@Kairouseki:
Penso ergo sum .
Except the fact that is Cogito ergo sum.
@Enma:
klet, I feel what you're saying. It's like that in my country (S. Korea) as well. In our translations there's a fine line between "chingu (friend/tomodachi)" and "dongryo (nakama)". We never had angst about the translation of the word "nakama" in my country's forums because there are Korean words that directly correspond with the Japanese words, plus we both use Chinese characters.
Well, the fact that Korean concepts are extremely similar to Japanese….
Same goes for Chinese.
But it's a moot point. Unfortunately western languages do not have that luxury in translation.
Korean and Japanese aren't related to Chinese to my knowledge, aside from the characters.
Or do you mean concepts shared culturally and not the actual technical language relation.
Korean isn't related to Japanese either. None of the languages are related to each other.
Korean and Japanese are considered possibly long long long distant relatives.
I mean it's theoretical at this point, but I think it holds water.
The people who became the Japanese did migrate from the Korean peninsula after all.
They're both considered possible distant relatives of the Altaic languages too, which completely seperates them from the Sino-Tibetan family, where Mandarin is from.
Hm, I didn't know that. As far as I'm aware (at least until this moment) Japanese is its own separate language family. That's pretty cool, though. If that's proved I want to read the analysis or whatever it's called.
Hm, I didn't know that. As far as I'm aware (at least until this moment) Japanese is its own separate language family. That's pretty cool, though. If that's proved I want to read the analysis or whatever it's called.
Japonic is it's own Language family. Though it's not just Japanese it's also Ryukyu. (Korean is all on it's lonesome)
But Language Families have wider families too, most of which are pretty controversial and not well pinned down.
Altaic is to Japonic and Turkic, what Indo-European is to Romance and Germanic.
So yeah, if Japanese is Altaic, that does mean it's an incredibly distant cousin of Turkish.
Never heard of Ryukyu. Does it have an information page somewhere? I'm gonna go look on Wikipedia. If Japanese is related to Turkish I want to know how hell that happened.
Edit: So Ryukyu is a sub family of Japonic. Interesting.
Altaic has it's nexus in northern central Asia, hypothetically in some form it oozed down into Korea and Japan, probably through Manchuria.
The Turkic sub-family is central asian in terms of it's heartland too. And some time around the later days of the Islamic Golden Age, and slightly before the Crusades, a Turkic migration into Arabia and Persia happened. They were called the Seljuqs, they left their cultural imprint on some of the locals and regional varities of their languages began to develop. In North Persia it turned into Azeri. And in Anatolia it turned into Turkish.
Why don't you ever post in the Different Language Discussion thread? That's really cool. I find it interesting that a language can change so much over time that two seemingly unrelated languages both came originally from the same language. With a lot of them there are obvious similarities but I guess not with others.
Why don't you ever post in the Different Language Discussion thread? That's really cool.
Because don't they talk mostly about actual language details? Like speaking and reading it?
That doesn't interest me.
The history and anthropology of languages does. It corresponds with movements of people and culture.
Nobody's talking in there right now :sideways: . I don't think anyone would mind it.
Where is it at anyway.
Somewhere in the general discussion forum. I'll go bump it.
Bump for great justice.
So, apparently Japanese is related to Korean and/or Turkish and other Altaic languages.
@JERK:
Korean and Japanese aren't related to Chinese to my knowledge, aside from the characters.
Or do you mean concepts shared culturally and not the actual technical language relation.
Concepts shared culturally, which also incorporates itself into the language.
Take "haki" for example. Or the general usage of ki/chi in everyday conversation (ex. "ki no sei" "ki ga shita"), not necessary superstitious.
There are many cultural concepts that carries over the asian lands and is relatively easy to translate since there's an easy equivalent.
Never heard of Ryukyu.
Okinawa.
Hypothetically it is.
It's a contested classification.
The ways words mutate is pretty odd. I looked up some of the word comparisons between Korean/Altaic languages and Japanese and they look kind of similar but it's not really much.
Your geographic explanation makes sense, though.
Have you heard of the Basque language? It's spoken in parts of France and Spain but isn't an Indo-European language. It's about as old as Latin and is spoken by about 600,000 people. There hasn't been any connection between it and any other language but there have been some hypothesized.
…I sure hope I'm not derailing the thread too much :ninja:
Anyway, what JERK DISEASE posted is really cool, I learned about the root of languages thing in History class but not to that extent.
And what Aohige said is correct; we use the "ki" in "haki" in everyday usage, only in Korea we pronounce it "gi." We might say "you have strong gi" to mean "you are a decisive, initiative and/or stubborn person."
Uh, I never posted in the Nakamates thread before, because I'm not interested in speculating in things like that, but….I don't think Perona is going to be the next crewmate. That's all I've got to say about the topic.
I hope the next nakamate is a fishman/mermaid.
i know this linguage
only those people that lives in "basque country"
that haves this linguage as "oficial"
(here in Brazil we say "Pais Basco")
i heard thats a unique linguage,and only a few people know
ok
now my question
I realy what to learn how to write in russian.
It is syllabic ?,Like Arabic spelling ?
Russian is an alphabet like the Latin alphabet but some letters do stand for syllables.
Ex:
я = Ya
ю = Yu
Arabic isn't syllabic, though, it's an abjad. Russian has vowels just like the Latin alphabet does, they work in basically the same way.
So your username in the Russian (or Cyrillic) alphabet would be Каптан Угли "Kaptan Ooglee" . Just as a transliteration, though, not a translation.
Thanks.
It is hard to learn ?
And more precisely…
It is a phonetic writing ?
It's actually fairly easy, at least it was for me. There are 33 letters I think, though, so there's more than in the Latin alphabet. And yes, each letter has a specific pronunciation and words are pronounced as they are spelt (for the most part) and vice versa.
And I just realized that I have Cyrillic in my profile. My location is Зона "Zona" or The Zone. The word in my sig is also Cyrillic and it's Сталкер "Stalker".
The ways words mutate is pretty odd. I looked up some of the word comparisons between Korean/Altaic languages and Japanese and they look kind of similar but it's not really much.
Your geographic explanation makes sense, though.
Have you heard of the Basque language? It's spoken in parts of France and Spain but isn't an Indo-European language. It's about as old as Latin and is spoken by about 600,000 people. There hasn't been any connection between it and any other language but there have been some hypothesized.
If the theories about the Basques are correct they're the last cultural continum left over from Neo-Lithic Europe undiluted by Indo-European, Uralic, or Asian language groups.
Oh god, neolithic? Are there any other languages left over from there or before? Like some of the Native American or Mayan/Aztec? There are some modern Mayan languages still spoken. Not sure about Aztec.
I didn't need to study english and german ,those languages just got into my mind (somehow).
That isolation thing about the Basque language is really interesting. I just recently stumbled over it when I looked up the Ainu language. Ainu is a language that only a dozen indigenous people still speak in northern Japan. Like the Basque language it too is what linguists call an isolated language meaning it has no relations to other languages. Basque is supposedly the second most spoken isolated language in the world, No 1 being Korean. However I think that in areas of the world that allowed traveling many of the languages that are being classified as isolated do indeed have relations but the languages they relate to have disappeared without leaving any trace behind. The highest number of isolated languages exists in South Amerika which makes sense because traveling around there is difficult and tribes were a lot more geographically isolated than people in Basque Country for example. That means there might be two different types of isolated languages. Those which lost their relatives and those who never had relatives to begin with.
This is a total amateur thinking without any base for his “arguments” btw.
That isolation thing about the Basque language is really interesting. I just recently stumbled over it when I looked up the Ainu language. Ainu is a language that only a dozen indigenous people still speak in northern Japan. Like the Basque language it too is what linguists call an isolated language meaning it has no relations to other languages. Basque is supposedly the second most spoken isolated language in the world, No 1 being Korean. However I think that in areas of the world that allowed traveling many of the languages that are being classified as isolated do indeed have relations but the languages they relate to have disappeared without leaving any trace behind.
That's exactly why. Look at the Celtic languages, they're backed into vague corners of western Europe and generally only second languages to English and French.
But Celtic peoples (and thus language) used to be all throughout western europe, before Romans and Germanic tribes poured in.
Cultural assimilation most often destroys languages.
It's true. I'm an American English speaker but, It's not my native language.