Next language to study

Which of the following languages should I study next?

Korean
12
21%
Arabic
7
12%
Finnish
14
25%
Hungarian
10
18%
Russian
6
11%
Dutch
8
14%
 
Total votes: 57

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Sean of the Dead
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Re: Next language to study

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2008-12-23, 4:18

How it was raped by the Normans, and now it's vocabulary is half Germanic and half French. :evil:
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Re: Next language to study

Postby ILuvEire » 2008-12-27, 2:21

lichtrausch wrote:
ILuvEire wrote:I agree, Norwegian is a good precursor, especially to get you into the mind-set of a real Germanic language (because English is a bit different).


What makes English an atypical Germanic language (if that's what you're saying)?


A few things. The main one being tenses. They are much more Romantic feeling that the other Germanic languages, and our choice of vocabulary (instead of a compound, we choose to borrow a Latin/Greek word).

English has one article, and no grammatical gender. All the other Germanic languages have 2+ genders/articles (except Afrikaans, which is another black sheep of the family). That being said, there's nothing wrong with English, I personally love the language, and all black sheep. :)
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Re: Next language to study

Postby ILuvEire » 2008-12-27, 2:23

Formiko wrote:
ILuvEire wrote:
Travis B. wrote:Heh - German is not that hard - unless you have to remember the gender and plural of any given word... heh


Have you tried Norwegian? Much easier.


Why not Swedish, which has 3 times the speakers?


There's really no difference. I love the "ø" but other than that the real reason was because the Norwegian book was cheaper. :)
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Re: Next language to study

Postby Travis B. » 2008-12-27, 2:32

I myself tend to be more partial to Norwegian than to Swedish personally, but that is largely because Norwegian has not undergone nearly as much dialect loss than Swedish, which aside from essentially localized versions of Standard Swedish is undergoing large-scale dialect loss outside of some special cases such as Ostrobothnian. Norwegian actually seems like a language with real dialects to me rather than just a standard language shorn of any dialects of real consequence outside from a few outliers which are practically separate languages (and not necessarily just from Swedish alone, but rather from a collective Scandinavian language as a whole).
secretGeek on CodingHorror wrote:Type inference is not a gateway drug to more dynamically typed languages.

Rather "var" is a gateway drug toward "real" type inferencing, of which var is but a tiny cigarette to the greater crack mountain!

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Re: Next language to study

Postby TaylorS » 2008-12-27, 19:46

lichtrausch wrote:
ILuvEire wrote:I agree, Norwegian is a good precursor, especially to get you into the mind-set of a real Germanic language (because English is a bit different).


What makes English an atypical Germanic language (if that's what you're saying)?


1. Loss of grammatical gender

2. Dominance of the Present Progressive because of Welsh linguistic substratum.

3. Odd usages of the word "do", also because of Welsh linguistic substratum ("Do you speak...".

4. Loss of "be" perfects except in archaic usage ("The Lord is come", "I am become Death", etc).

5. Loss of "thou" and associated verb inflections.

6. Loss of V2 syntax.

7. Huge injection of French-derived vocabulary.
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TaylorS
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Re: Next language to study

Postby TaylorS » 2008-12-27, 19:50

ILuvEire wrote:
lichtrausch wrote:
ILuvEire wrote:I agree, Norwegian is a good precursor, especially to get you into the mind-set of a real Germanic language (because English is a bit different).


What makes English an atypical Germanic language (if that's what you're saying)?


A few things. The main one being tenses. They are much more Romantic feeling that the other Germanic languages,


English got sucked into the Western European Sprachbund, and it shows
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Re: Next language to study

Postby Travis B. » 2008-12-28, 2:57

TaylorS wrote:
ILuvEire wrote:
lichtrausch wrote:What makes English an atypical Germanic language (if that's what you're saying)?


A few things. The main one being tenses. They are much more Romantic feeling that the other Germanic languages,


English got sucked into the Western European Sprachbund, and it shows


A lot of it seems rather coincidental to me, though, as the only languages that have had a real fundamental impact upon English are Old Norse and Brythonic and its daughter languages, which happened too far back for one to really speak of a Western European Sprachbund in the modern sense of the term. Even the Oïl languages' impact upon English has been largely a matter of borrowing of words, roots, and morphemes, and the impact of such upon everyday spoken English is overstated. Rather, I really think that a lot of these kinds of changes within the Anglic dialect continuum have been internal changes which have been readily allowed through the lack of contact between the Anglic dialect continuum and both the continental West Germanic dialect continuum and the North Germanic dialect continuum (aside from the limited case of the contact of what became Shetlandic and Orcadian with the Norn dialects). Of course, then, one other interesting thing is that in very many ways, present-day Anglic dialects are superficially much more like more analytic North Germanic dialects than they are like continental West Germanic dialects, despite the development of such similarities significantly postdating the contact between Old English and Old Norse.
secretGeek on CodingHorror wrote:Type inference is not a gateway drug to more dynamically typed languages.

Rather "var" is a gateway drug toward "real" type inferencing, of which var is but a tiny cigarette to the greater crack mountain!


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