Elly

This would be difficult to converse with and practice here, of course, without videos or massive photo embeds. Still...it is a language that I'd like to learn to fluency one day. I know that there's a difference between U.K. sign language and American sign language in the alphabet, at least. When I lived in Indonesia, I had a neighbor who spoke in sign language (she was deaf-mute), and the speaking neighbor of mine who lives with her (they were relatives) said that a relative of theirs from Russia, also a deaf-mute, tried to speak sign language with her but it was different. Was it just the gestures giving a different and indecipherable "accent"? Or are there truly as many kinds of sign language as there are spoken and written languages within a region?

That's true! Those writing systems are art forms in themselves. Hieroglyphics were partially phonetic, though, I have a pet theory that maybe pictograms as a common alphabet came up earlier on in a language and developed as an art parallel to the spoken language whereas maybe phonetic alphabets might have come about when language had already been spoken for a long time. I could be wrong, though, maybe in a culture where auditory learning was encouraged could spur the creation of a phonetic alphabet earlier in the spoken language. Cuneiform is pretty old, after all, but had to be simpler than pictograms.

Maybe it depends on the learning style. If your learning style is not developed in visual-abstract information, then reading will be more difficult. If your learning style is tactile-kinaesthetic, then writing should be very easy! Actually speaking the language can depend not only on your personal learning style (auditory and intrapersonal intelligence) but on the support system that your society has. If everyone around you who speaks the language that you want to learn is, for whatever reason, really mean...then that can balance out an auditory learning style, unfortunately...

Maybe it's because I listen to music a lot and get really into it, especially Broadway musicals where the story of the whole thing really matters...but they're good. I'm a huge reader, but lately I've been feeling sort of burnt out on reading, if that's possible. So, when I see an article online, I just copy-paste it to a word processor on my computer that has the function of reading it out loud. It's a stilted, robotic voice...but it helps when I feel like I can't read anymore. Some real audio books play out like radio dramas, with great sound quality, sound effects, and voice talents. I think that it could be an art of its own. I mean, one of the really popular storytelling media in my generation right now is Welcome To Night Vale, which is a podcast radio drama available online. I think that if you asked anybody a few years ago what the next big thing was going to be, nobody would have guessed "a radio drama", because that seemed to be a dead art.

Talking? To my friends? Of course not! We make up words. We slur our pronunciation. We put on fake accents that don't exist. We begin and end sentences with conjunctions and prepositions. We turn nouns into verbs, and verbs into adjectives. We're as incorrect as possible while still being understood!

Just by looking at Cyrillic (Russian writing, right?) it looks very similar to Greek but not... and Greece is geographically quite far so perhaps I'm totally off-base on that. Aramaic looks very flowy! Does it read from right to left, instead of left to right like we're used to with English? I too wonder how everyone decided to agree on the symbol-sound link.

I grew up in the Philippines, but my single mother (never knew my father) was fluent in American English. That's what we spoke at home, that's the language in the books she had for her children to read, so I'd watch television shows in English, and even at school many of my classmates were forced to speak English--which I was fine with going along with because I didn't have that problem. There was also this strange "can or can't" mentality that went with it...during break time at school, we were allowed to speak Tagalog (or Filipino, or Cebuano, Ilongo or whatever) but it never occurred to any of us that if they spoke Filipino with me around then I would eventually learn it. It was just sort of, "Well, if you can't then you can't." I suppose that was nice of them, but I wish I wasn't so disconnected with my own culture. What really fascinated me, though, was that my great-grandparents on my mother's side were Italian and Irish. I think that Italian is a beautifully powerful language, but for some reason gets left out in most school extracurriculars or courses--it's all Spanish and French. I don't even know if my great-grandmother came from a Gaelic-speaking part of Ireland, but this heritage has also given me a fascination for the language.

I also suspect that it could be just a little bit of ethnocentrism... Japanese is a difficult syntax to get used to for those used to romance languages and English. For those used to the syntax of some Asian languages, it might be easier to catch so it's only the writing system that needs drills and learning (which, as I mentioned, I'm a huge fan of.)

Everytime or Every Time If I recall correctly, the required frequency to coin a new word is 5 instances in 5 separate sources within 3 months of each other. So, if you really want to make "everytime" happen, then just keep using it until it catches on. This isn't a dead language, so nothing's set in stone. Personally, though, I don't ever remember reading "everytime" as one word; it was always "every time". I had read somewhere that "almighty" is all right but "alright" is not all right. Still, my spellchecker right now deems alright all right.

Text messages over the phone? I'd actually give it a pass. Maybe, too, if I had reason to suspect that they'd sent an e-mail over a phone. Over anything that could actually be typed, though...I'm just flabbergasted, because I think it's more difficult to type in "chatspeak". I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but there's always a small and very strong part of me that is judging very harshly :bored: "You think that's cute, huh? Well, I don't go for cute. Only lower life forms use shortcuts."

Queen Isabella of Spain had a lisp. To this day, some words in Castillian Spanish honor her in the imitation of her speech problem It not only sounds like an English-only thing for you, but a written word only thing? If so, then perhaps Japanese would have you covered in that way, but something like French (which has so many silent extra letters in the written form) would be a challenge to write and better to learn through conversation...but you'll really never know until you try!

Yes and no. No, because I don't believe that a language can so simply appear. It's going to have roots, unless some totalitarian regime says, "Hurrah, we've completed our dictionary! All your children will learn this. Stop talking to them with your natural pollutant tongues, parents and teachers." Yes, because as long as a language is alive it will evolve. Even in a single language, we can see the change in accents within a few generations, a shift in syntax within a few more generations...and even within a single language, many sub-cultural colloquialisms.

Japan is still quite an economically powerful, industrious nation. It would be handy to learn if you were getting into the international business world, especially since a lot of Japanese people are comfortable with not learning anything but Japanese (unlike, well...many Asian colonies I can name that basically balance several dialects of a native language with the language of all our conquerers just to keep up with our history.) Japanese has its own writing system. I love that, because I think the Latin alphabet is frightfully boring, but a new writing system is off-putting to some new language learners. There's also quite an international cultural impact. Fans of Japanese anime, manga, video games, J-pop and J-rock, live action dramas filmed in Japan, as well as Japanese classical literature and poetry and so on would certainly benefit from learning the original language, as well as the language itself being quite beautiful. Those who don't see the profound appeal of the nation's entertainment media might not understand the enthusiasm.

Hieroglyphics are neat. Interestingly, the way of reading hieroglyphics, in which so many important announcements of the ancient world were written, was actually extinct for a while It doesn't look like it has to be too detailed: "Isis" is a bean-shape, for example. But yeah, the lion still looks like a lion instead of a few simple lines to suggest a lion, the falcon still looks like a falcon...to think that all that complicated attention to detail was almost lost, so the alphabets really depend on the language being alive! If it were actual symbols rather than a symbolic alphabet (mostly), it might not even have been sure to be understood. People were confused for a while about why some cave paintings showed animals that weren't available for hunting by the people who painted it, and we can guess that these were spirit animals like guardians of the cave people, but we can't be sure. This reminds me of the novel Nation by Terry Pratchett, where this 18th century English princess is shipwrecked on some tropical island after a tsunami, and has to communicate with the only remaining tribesman there. She leaves him a drawing of where her shelter is, and a stick figure that's supposed to be him, and an arrow pointing towards where she lives to mean "come over to visit me." The tribesman interprets the drawing as "stand in front of the place that looks like the drawing, and throw a spear at it" which makes for an interesting first meeting!

I'm sure its par for the course that when words fail, miming things out can be roughly international...but maybe that's for another thread. She wasn't embarrassed, since that was quite creative and by all accounts the chicken was delicious :grin:

I sometimes wonder how the written language systems developed. Pictograms coming from drawings are reasonable enough. What made the creators of alphabets focus on the sounds? How did the community of early English-speaking (English-writing) people jostle around to decide to keep "c" even though "k" and "s" were right there--and double the "u"? (In French, if I remember correctly, it's "double V" not double u). China has a number of different languages, but the writing system is standardized because it isn't a phonetic alphabet. Japanese has three alphabets. Ogham could be used to write both Gaelic and Latin--I guess it's a reverse of the English alphabet used for "Romanization". It threw me, too, at first, that there are as many notches on a solid line for one character as another, the only difference being a slant, but then again in English calligraphy "a" and "d" can look too similar as well as "e" and "l" if the handwriting is sloppy. Reciting the carakan alphabet (or syllabarie, I guess is the correct technical term for it) makes a complete sentence that actually makes sense. What's your favorite writing system? Or the writing system with a development history that you find fascinating?

I think that everyone has an accent, but it just doesn't become apparent until you move away from people who speak the same way--unless you have a speech quirk such as lisping or something. I can't hear when mine changes, though, and apparently I pick up on accents quickly without noticing it. I don't know how long they stick around, though, because as I said I can't really hear the difference.

I like to be able to compare them, if I can. So, if the translation has enough footnotes to equal the volume of the text of its own, I'm happy to read all of the translator's reasoning for each and every one of their translation choices! They usually come with some historical or cultural tidbit, too. There are also some books, the new English translation of the Italian poem by Dante The Divine Comedy for example, where they print the English version next to the Italian version so that they match up line-for-line.

I've read that Sengoidelc is a good supplement to understanding the etymology of some vocabulary words. Does a parallel study in Sengoidelc help in any other way? Or has the grammar and syntax changed enough that, to ever actually be able to hold a conversation, better stick to modern Gaelic?

A friend of mine went to buy some chicken at the market, but forgot the tonality for "chicken" so she took up an egg, and pointed to it, as she told the grocer in Mandarin, "I want its mother!"

I love this question! I asked it of a teacher of mine who was multi-lingual, and the reply was, "It depends on who I talk to more." That actually opened my eyes to the real purpose of language and how much more important community is than I thought previously.

Pretty much every other person that I've met who learned English as a second language, credit comic books with luring them in. (I say "every other person" because they've always been boys. Apparently girls are conditioned to just slog through learning another language the non-comic way, or maybe learn by conversational immersion?) As others have mentioned: Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi have elevated comic books to a high artistic level. The pulpy funny pages, and superhero comics, they have their place in our culture too... and to snub even the latter just because, reveals the snobbish person's lousy attitude and ignorance more than their personal taste!