The Language Thread

Topic

This is the thread for Kalman to argue endlessly with people about languages.

Replies

For various reasons, I cannot keep learning Quechua. I can’t be doing all these non-Indo-European languages at once, especially one that I’ll probably never use. More important is the fact that I have little access to resources. So I’ll be doing Welsh for my non-Jewish endangered language. I know Gar will laugh, but I will stick to it, like I stuck to Quechua until it became unfeasable.

Welsh is a minority language, it is not endangered. Speakers are increasing.

[RonnieM]

garjones wrote:

Welsh is a minority language, it is not endangered. Speakers are increasing.

UNESCO classifies it as “vulnerable” which is the same level as the Quechua I was learning, despite the fact the latter has 3x the speakers as Welsh. Linguists tend to look at “vulnerable” languages as on the same scale as endangered languages. I’m sorry if that offended you, it’s just how the science classifies things. And there is a movement among some linguists to replace the paradigm of vulnerable/endangered languages for that very reason: the current paradigm might be offensive to speakers. Welsh is considered to be a “language..in danger” by sociolinguists. Also, the most recent data suggests that speakers are falling, but that was eight years ago.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by RonnieM.

Linguists may ‘tend’ to view vulnerable as endangered but UNESCO doesn’t categorise them the same.
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That’s the most recent census data, from 2011 (Next will be 2021). The Office of National Statistics last year recorded a rise in a survey with a very large sample base.
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I’m not offended, if it’s endangered then it’s endangered and feelings don’t come into it, I just think it’s inaccurate because looking at numbers alone doesn’t give you the full perspective. they will likely always remain low because the population of Wales is small. To reach Quechua level would basically mean every single person was fluent and more outside. However it has a very robust infrastructure of support surrounding it. It’s protected in law, it has Welsh medium full time education funded, full time TV and radio channels and a strong publishing operation. In fact by law every school in Wales teaches Welsh at least one hour per week, so those with a basic understanding is much higher than the number of fluent speakers.
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As you’ll find it has a lot of learning resources available. It’s supported on Duolingo when languages with a broader speaking base in numbers isn’t. There are podcasts, online resources, Twitter accounts. So it’s not a personal reaction of offence from me, it’s a better understanding of the situation surrounding it. Most endangered languages are in sharp decline because they have little support or are sometimes even actively discouraged.
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I hope that better explains where I’m coming from.

That’s the thing: UNESCO classifies the Quechua I was learning on the same level as Welsh because even though it has more speakers, yet has a smaller support system: Yes, it’s officially recognized by Peru and Bolivia as Official Languages, but all schools are bilingual; There is also no standard, but this could lead to confusion; Southern Peruvian Quechua is Vulnerable, like Welsh, yet surrounding dialects are counted as separate languages, and are more endangered, but the question must be asked: Since they are mutually intelligible, should we count them together and would that change the status?
Important to note is that while Sociolinguists do recognize the difference between Vulnerable and Endangered languages, NGOs that mainly focus on the latter also put some time into the former; So while recognizing that it’s not “Endangered” The Endangered Language Project does list Welsh in its catalog of Languages, so there is a lot of overlap in looking at “Vulnerable” and “Endangered” languages, even if the difference is acknowledged.

Yes but the Endangered Language Project doesn’t categorise it as that, it’s vulnerable the same as UNESCO, it’s just the umbrella title of their project. So the two major international groups studying it agree with me it isn’t endangered.

To be honest the data on the ELP study is not very good and contains basic flaws. The number they quote as ‘worldwide’ speakers is derived from a census table that is broken down by Welsh local authority. So actually it doesn’t include anyone outside of Wales, including Patagonia and the rest of the UK. (There are 111,000 Welsh speakers in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland).

I do really know about this subject Kalman. As I said it’s not coming from an emotional place it’s coming from me knowing more because it’s something I grew up surrounded by.

garjones wrote:

the ELP study

Wait, I thought this was about languages, not Prog Rock. Get DavidM over here!!

[Rocket]

ELP -Karn Evil 9 pt 2 https://youtu.be/IwSTe9uit48 still haven’t figured out embedding

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Rocket.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Rocket.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Rocket.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by RonnieM.

Not much to figure out. Just post the URL in the reply.

Like the previous board, it has to be posted on a line by itself (not part of a sentence in another line) to embed properly.

[RonnieM]

garjones wrote:

Yes but the Endangered Language Project doesn’t categorise it as that, it’s vulnerable the same as UNESCO, it’s just the umbrella title of their project. So the two major international groups studying it agree with me it isn’t endangered.

To be honest the data on the ELP study is not very good and contains basic flaws. The number they quote as ‘worldwide’ speakers is derived from a census table that is broken down by Welsh local authority. So actually it doesn’t include anyone outside of Wales, including Patagonia and the rest of the UK. (There are 111,000 Welsh speakers in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland).

I do really know about this subject Kalman. As I said it’s not coming from an emotional place it’s coming from me knowing more because it’s something I grew up surrounded by.

I never said that the ELP claimed it to be endangered, just that the fact that they list it shows how vulnerable languages are treated alongside endangered languages, as they are seen as both falling under the category of “Languages that in the recentish past have had large amounts of attrition (loss of speakers)”. The fact they only cite the Welsh census actually shows that: Most “endangered” languages are spoken within one area of the world (thus UNESCO often listing a Native American/First Nation language spoken on multiple reservations/reserves as different language; I admit it’s inconsistent; they should treat “Patagonian Welsh” as separate by that definition); the only counterexamples I can think of are Scottish Gaelic (spoken in Nova Scotia, and its position there is more precarious than in Scotland) and Yiddish (America, Israel,various places in Europe, but “speakers were victims of Genocide in the past century” sort of explain it). Some endangered languages have had their range changed whether due to forced displacement (Many Native American languages, Lashon Didan from Syria/Iraq to Israel),or mass voluntary exodus (most Bukharian Jews moving from Uzbekistan to be concentrated in Queens after the fall of the USSR), but this effects all or at least most of the language.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by RonnieM.

njerry wrote:

garjones wrote:

the ELP study

Wait, I thought this was about languages, not Prog Rock. Get DavidM over here!!

Well, when people talk about IPA beer, I often joke “Why are we talking about languages?”

[garjones]

Anonymous wrote:

The fact they only cite the Welsh census actually shows that: Most “endangered” languages are spoken within one area of the world

It’s a reflection of a huge global project not really knowing the subject in any depth. Patagonia is a nice story but the population very very small, the city with the highest number of Welsh speakers in the world isn’t in Wales, it’s London. This is not through some strange displacement in history but it’s the place in the UK with the highest paying jobs, they move when they graduate just as loads of people do in the USA.
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They don’t rate it as endangered is a fact, they also don’t understand the subject as well as I do. You can keep disagreeing but it seems rather pointless, I’m not giving you pointers on how Jewish languages are spoken as you know better than me.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by garjones.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by RonnieM.

[RonnieM]

garjones wrote:

KalmanL wrote:

The fact they only cite the Welsh census actually shows that: Most “endangered” languages are spoken within one area of the world

It’s a reflection of a huge global project not really knowing the subject in any depth. Patagonia is a nice story but the population very very small, the city with the highest number of Welsh speakers in the world isn’t in Wales, it’s London. This is not through some strange displacement in history but it’s the place in the UK with the highest paying jobs, they move when they graduate just as loads of people do in the USA.
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They don’t rate it as endangered is a fact, they also don’t understand the subject as well as I do. You can keep disagreeing but it seems rather pointless, I’m not giving you pointers on how Jewish languages are spoken as you know better than me.

I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m actually agreeing with you: It’s not endangered it’s vulnerable, but I called it “endangered” because in some linguistic circles “endangered” is shorthand for “endangered and vulnerable languages” grouped together because, in most cases both are “Languages that in the recentish past have had large amounts of attrition (loss of speakers)”.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by RonnieM.

[garjones]

Whatever. In some circles people put pegs on their nipples.
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I’m very happy though these ‘circles’ know more about about these things than people on the ground. Viva Wikipedia.
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None of it really matters because you don’t actually learn any of these 236 languages you’ve mentioned over the last 5 years, you just read stuff about the history and linguistics and then move on.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by garjones.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by garjones.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by garjones.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by RonnieM.

[RonnieM]

I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m actually agreeing with you: It’s not endangered it’s vulnerable, but I called it “endangered” because in some linguistic circles “endangered” is shorthand for “endangered and vulnerable languages” grouped together because, in most cases both are “Languages that in the recentish past have had large amounts of attrition (loss of speakers)”. I should have been more clear, especially since, in any case, Quechua is also “vulnerable”, not “endangered, and I’m not posting for people who use the shorthand; I should have said “Vulnerable or Endangered”
I actually disagree with UNESCO’s assessment of Yiddish, and think it should be “Vulnerable”, instead of “definitely endangered” as these assessments are partially based on passing down the language to the next generation, and there are populations with high levels of retention, it’s just that they feel all their reactions with sociologists have been “biased” so they won’t cooperate with any social scientist unless they are Orthodox Jews themselves, as they don’t fully understand the difference between “sociologist” and “Sociolinguist”; anybody with “Socio-” in the job title who approaches them is seen as an “agent of Radical Liberalism”

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by RonnieM.

[RonnieM]

garjones wrote:

Whatever. In some circles people put pegs on their nipples.
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I’m very happy though these ‘circles’ know more about about these things than people on the ground. Viva Wikipedia.
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None of it really matters because you don’t actually learn any of these 236 languages you’ve mentioned over the last 5 years, you just read stuff about the history and linguistics and then move on.

First of all, they don’t ‘know’ anything different from the facts, they just analyze “endangered and vulnerable languages” as being part of the same spectrum of “Languages that in the recentish past have had large amounts of attrition (loss of speakers)”, and use “endangered” as a shorthand for that category. It’s like the fact that when I say “I have diabetes”, everybody, including doctors, assumes I mean Diabetes Mellitus and not Insipidus, the only question being “type 1 or type 2?”. For these people, “Endangered” implies an unspoken “or Vulnerable”, just like “Diabetes” implies an unspoken “Mellitus”
Second of all, yes, sometimes I read just a description of a language, but I can speak in Yiddish now, and can have short conversations in Russian, Spanish and Hindi. My Endocrinologist is a native Hindi speaker, and during my last appointment, we talked in a mixture of Hindi and English, switching to English for Medical terminology I don’t know in Hindi.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by RonnieM.

Anonymous wrote:

First of all, they don’t ‘know’ anything different from the facts,

The facts I have just established that they have wrong.

My sister was just complaining that this isn’t a correct sentence:
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The old man the boat.
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I can’t see anything wrong with it, can you?

It took me a couple of seconds to work that out.

Clearly, it refers to this.

Has Miqque made the transition from MW to The Carrier?

Bruce wrote:

Has Miqque made the transition from MW to The Carrier?

Hmm it seems not, he tried to register in August but the system says he never authenticated. That could be because before I made some tweaks that authentication email automatically went to spam folders. This is why I asked nobody to try and sign up in August while I was testing but 27 people ignored the fuck out of that and did it anyway.

If anyone has another way to access Miqque maybe they can try and help him through reconnecting.

DavidM wrote:

My sister was just complaining that this isn’t a correct sentence:
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The old man the boat.
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I can’t see anything wrong with it, can you?

It’s a complete sentence when ‘man’ is a verb, but if you were to throw an and after ‘man’ it would become an incomplete sentence because ‘man’ becomes a noun.

DavidM wrote:

My sister was just complaining that this isn’t a correct sentence:
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The old man the boat.
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I can’t see anything wrong with it, can you?

It’s a complete sentence when ‘man’ is a verb, but if you were to throw an and after ‘man’ it would become an incomplete sentence because ‘man’ becomes a noun.

Anonymous wrote:

Second of all, yes, sometimes I read just a description of a language, but I can speak in Yiddish now, and can have short conversations in Russian, Spanish and Hindi

I’m disappointed you have not become a polyglot during my absence from the board, Kalman. I recall us arguing over tribal aboriginal languages and you suggested you were trying to learn a whole bunch of different languages like Greek, Arabic and Basque. What happened to that? I know Greek and Arabic are hard but i know a little Basque myself and its not so tough. Quechua too (i lived in Bolivia and can speak some extremely basic phrases).

garjones wrote:

KalmanL wrote:

First of all, they don’t ‘know’ anything different from the facts,

The facts I have just established that they have wrong.

I meant the fact that it’s not endangered; everybody agrees on that, it’s just that some people use “endangered” to mean “It’s not extinct but UNESCO does not classify it as safe”, which is true, they classify it as “Vulnerable”, it’s just that “Endangered” is shorthand for “Endangered or Vulnerable”, I was wrong and stupid to assume that people would get that. I only brought up the ELP to show the shorthand use of “Endangered”, with no comment on whether their data is correct or not, other than that they admit it is not “endangered” just “Vulnerable”, yet their name includes “Endangered”, not “Vulnerable”. The fact that the ELP is a bad user of that usage does not mean the usage is not true or used by more educated people.

Anonymous wrote:

KalmanL wrote:

Second of all, yes, sometimes I read just a description of a language, but I can speak in Yiddish now, and can have short conversations in Russian, Spanish and Hindi

I’m disappointed you have not become a polyglot during my absence from the board, Kalman. I recall us arguing over tribal aboriginal languages and you suggested you were trying to learn a whole bunch of different languages like Greek, Arabic and Basque. What happened to that? I know Greek and Arabic are hard but i know a little Basque myself and its not so tough. Quechua too (i lived in Bolivia and can speak some extremely basic phrases).

I am learning 12 languages: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Greek, Hungarian, Bukharian, Hindi, Bengali, Levantine Arabic, Chinese, Yoruba, and Welsh. The problem with Quechua is that finding good resources is hard, plus it’s not Indo-European, and I’m learning four non-IE languages already (Hungarian, Arabic, Chinese and Yoruba) and at last Hungarian is spoken in Europe, and Arabic is close to Biblical Hebrew, which I know already. I’ve already managed to teach myself Yiddish, and as I said, my Spanish, Russian, and Hindi are quite good, but not quite that advanced; the others I know a few phrases and can construct some sentences in, but the going is slow if you’re learning so many at once- maybe with a decade of constant practice I can be much better in all of them, and I can see myself being greatly more advanced in a few of them in two years or so.

garjones wrote:

Bruce wrote:

Has Miqque made the transition from MW to The Carrier?

Hmm it seems not, he tried to register in August but the system says he never authenticated. That could be because before I made some tweaks that authentication email automatically went to spam folders. This is why I asked nobody to try and sign up in August while I was testing but 27 people ignored the fuck out of that and did it anyway.

If anyone has another way to access Miqque maybe they can try and help him through reconnecting.

Miqque has also been having some health issues. He just posted a few hours ago. He said his eyes are blurry.

Just out of interest Gar, how many people have registered?

Post in random …

Anonymous wrote:

I am learning 12 languages: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Greek, Hungarian, Bukharian, Hindi, Bengali, Levantine Arabic, Chinese, Yoruba, and Welsh.

Is there much point in learning Welsh when you’ve offended the only Welsh speaker you know by Kalmansplaining how endangered it is?

It actually shows at the bottom of the main page (unless it only shows for me as admin).

75 members

Martin Smith wrote:

KalmanL wrote:

I am learning 12 languages: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Greek, Hungarian, Bukharian, Hindi, Bengali, Levantine Arabic, Chinese, Yoruba, and Welsh.

Is there much point in learning Welsh when you’ve offended the only Welsh speaker you know by Kalmansplaining how endangered it is?

I will repeat my explanation one more time: I never argued that it was endangered, I was only defending my calling it “endangered” as a shorthand for “A language that is not extinct, but UNESCO classifies it as not safe”, being a short version of the phrase “Endangered or Vulnerable languages” As a final argument, UNESCO itself describes their atlas as “The latest edition of the Atlas ……. and lists about 2,500 languages (among which 230 languages extinct since 1950), approaching the generally-accepted estimate of some 3,000 endangered languages worldwide”, despite the fact that that number contains many languages listed as “Vulnerable”, so even they’re doing it.
As for the reason, I don’t know any Quechua speakers at all, but learning a minority language, especially one that is Vulnerable or Endangered, that is not a Jewish language, is an act of solidarity for all such languages, showing it’s not just languages like Yiddish or Bukharian that concern me, but as I know Yiddish, I’m showing my empathy for speakers of all such languages, showing that I’m not just concerned for Jewish languages.

Your argument won’t be accepted until you can state it in Welsh.

Martin Smith wrote:

Your argument won’t be accepted until you can state it in Welsh.

Iawn a da.

It doesn’t matter, anyway, as this discussion made me think I should learn a language that some sources ( like UNESCO) classify as actually endangered. I have chosen irish, as some consider it endangered, not vulnerable. If that’s wrong, I’m only basing it off UNESCO data.

Is this the 4th or 5th time you have shifted from Welsh to Irish or Scottish now?

Going by how some people are bastardizing the language I’d say Dutch is endangered too.

garjones wrote:

Is this the 4th or 5th time you have shifted from Welsh to Irish or Scottish now?

You’re forgetting the time I dabbled in Breton, thanks to, of all things, South Park

[garjones]

To me you make a bit of a mockery of learning languages. You feel the confidence to try and correct fluent speakers, name countless languages you are learning at the same time, which nobody sensible does, and then display no noticeable understanding of them.
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You may have used Google Translate to come up with “iawn a da” as a response, nobody in Wales has ever used that. It’s literally translated as ‘correct and good’ but idiomatically would never be used and misses a mutation. All in just 3 words. I don’t know what resource anyone could possibly use that wouldn’t deliver ‘da iawn’ as the correct answer.
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Most people in the US and UK are monoglot and it may seem easy to impress there with a couple of words but this is an international board. It probably is more sensible to go as obscure as possible so nobody catches on.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by garjones.

I have my doubts as to how many languages anyone can master to some satisfactory degree, unless someone is an extraordinary savant. I knew one Spanish guy who spoke 7 languages, he corrected German speakers on their knowledge of the Swiss dialect. I can’t really vouch for his mastery of any of them though except for Czech whch he spoke fluently.

It’s my experience that knowledge of any language you learned later in life evaporates quickly if you stop using it. I used to know Serbian/Croatian quite well but I couldn’t order a drink in it right now.

Not using Google:
Мой дедушка- мой отцы отец- пораделсяа в украйне- в малодой город, Златапол, недалеко з Уман.

I can understand that, but I can’t say if it’s correct grammatically. I can mostly decipher Cyrillic. And Slavic languages are close enough that I can guess the meaning when it’s written down.

I was more concerned with the spelling. Weird things happened to Moscow Russian’s vowels in the nineteenth century, which was used since Lenin’s times as the official spoken language, but they insist on, with some consonant letters removed, spelling things like Pushkin did

Anonymous wrote:

Not using Google:
Мой дедушка- мой отцы отец- пораделсяа в украйне- в малодой город, Златапол, недалеко з Уман.

I am fluent in this language. The direct translation is:

“Hi I’m Kalman. Gareth is a butthead. Kalman is the best. Languages rox. Goooooooooo Yiddish!”

No it’s “rufen sie einen Taxi bitte sonst verpass Ich meinen Flug” (obscure Chris Morris reference)

Anonymous wrote:

KalmanL wrote:

Not using Google:
Мой дедушка- мой отцы отец- пораделсяа в украйне- в малодой город, Златапол, недалеко з Уман.

I am fluent in this language. The direct translation is:

“Hi I’m Kalman. Gareth is a butthead. Kalman is the best. Languages rox. Goooooooooo Yiddish!”

Unmmm……. interesting….. translation…..

Anonymous wrote:

No it’s “rufen sie einen Taxi bitte sonst verpass Ich meinen Flug” (obscure Chris Morris reference)

Not that obscure.

“He said he didn’t like it, but he’d have to go along with it.”

English is my second language and I don’t have a first.

In the Netherlands we have the Frisian language which I think is probably also listed as “endangered” or “vulnerable”. It is fully supported by the state in official use but I think usage is decreasing over time. Maybe it is different in Wales as thre might be more of a national pride thing, and some hostility towards the English, a will to be different from the English in language. I don’t think most Frisians feel a similar attitude towards “Hollandic” Dutch. (But don’t call them Hollanders)

Frisian is actually the continental Germanic language most closely related to English. I’ve heard that the Frisian phrase for “Good butter and good cheese is good English” can be understood by English speakers who are familiar with Nederlanders or North Germans pronouncing English.

We also have Frisian as a language in Germany.

I think Frisian and Dutch have a lot in common in that they sound closer to medieval German than current German does.

Frisian is pretty close to Dutch in some ways and in some ways not. It sounds like I should be able to understand it, they have the same sounds, except the words are different.

Standard Dutch as it is today is a bit of a mix between old Frankic and Frisian. The standard dialect is influenced by old Flemish dialects, weirdly enough. In the 80 years war the protestant Flemish fled to the North and settled in the big towns of the Netherlands. The old dialects that used to be spoken in Holland are pretty different from what is spoken here today. Some of the older dialects are still spoken in some parts of Holland like Katwijk, a city that is about 30 km from where I live but I understand very little when they speak, it just sounds weird. I think Afrikaans is also closer to the old Hollandic dialects than standard Dutch is.

As I said, I’ve heard Frisian described as being like English, but pronounced like Nederlands and without the Norman vocabulary.

Anonymous wrote:

I can understand that, but I can’t say if it’s correct grammatically. I can mostly decipher Cyrillic. And Slavic languages are close enough that I can guess the meaning when it’s written down.

There is one grammatical error, but it’s an irregular verb. There is also a spelling error, I said “had made himself rejoice” instead of “he was born”, but as I said, Russian uses the current Moscow pronunciation, while, with a few letters (used only in mostly religious loanwords from Greek, so Lenin had them removed) spells things like they were in Pushkin’s 19th century Petersburg influenced dialect, so while not English level of spelling difficulty, it is sort of hard to transcribe things from the standard pronunciation.

[Mike]

I don’t know if this is deliberate or just random, but either way, it makes me grin

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Mike.

… also, adding posts in the random thread still seem to pop up in the language thread for me

Anonymous wrote:

There is one grammatical error, but it’s an irregular verb. There is also a spelling error, I said “had made himself rejoice” instead of “he was born”, but as I said, Russian uses the current Moscow pronunciation, while, with a few letters (used only in mostly religious loanwords from Greek, so Lenin had them removed) spells things like they were in Pushkin’s 19th century Petersburg influenced dialect, so while not English level of spelling difficulty, it is sort of hard to transcribe things from the standard pronunciation.

I also think there should be an ending to the noun “gorod” as it is in the localis. And I think you used the wrong adjective, you said malodoj which I think means young. I think you meant small which would probably something like maloj or malenkoj.

I had an interesting linguistic experience Friday Night: I was at an older friend’s house, and his wife is from South Africa and knows Afrikaans. My native language is English and I know Yiddish, and all three languages are West Germanic, so I asked her to say something in Afrikaans, and I was able to understand it.

Afrikaans is a bit odd for me. It is very close to Dutch but they do a few grammar things differently, like they don’t conjugate verbs, which makes it sound kind of funny for many Dutch people, it sounds like a linguistic mistake a child would make.

They also use a double negative. They use “nie” (not, or in Dutch niet) before the main verb and after it. So something like “He doesn’t speak nglish” would be something like “Hy spreek nie Engels nie.” Their pronounciation is also a bit different from standard Dutch, like they have a rolling r.

The R is all over the map in Dutch pronunciation, there are some people who use the rolling R but not the majority, in the Western part most people use something similar to the way R is pronounced in American English. There are also people who pronounce the R a bit throaty, similar to the phlegmy G people use in Dutch.

I’d say I understand about 70 % of spoken Afrikaans, more when written. Dutch people who say they understand Afrikaans perfectly are full of shit (unless they studied it). Some things are really different. Especially in specific Afrikaans dialects.

Like this is the Afrikaans conjugation of the verb to be:

Afrikaans
ek is (Dutch ik ben, Eng I am)
jy/u is (Dutch jij bent, Eng you are)
hy/sy/dit is (Hij/zij is, Eng he/she is)
ons is (Dutch wij zijn, Eng we are)
julle is (Dutch jullie zijn, Eng you are plural)
hulle is (Dutch zij zijn, Eng they are)

I was watching a video comparing Afrikaans Dutch, and it seems that it went through some of the same grammatical shifts as Yiddish from Middle German, though Yiddish still preserves verb inflections in the present, the past is former very much like in Afrikaans

We owe Welsh an apology for its spelling; if you know the rules, you know how to pronounce it. Irish, especially in the dialects, not the standard….well, no so much. Oíche “Night”, while pronounced o-hyuh in school Irish and most dialects, is pronounced as ee in the south of Co. Galway dialect I am learning.

Absolutely. Welsh is almost entirely phonetic, the letter Y has some variation but it’s ironically very easy to pronounce if you just learn the alphabet.

It takes constant abuse from monoglot English speakers though despite the fact that they expect you to make sense of stuff like ‘cough/bough/rough’.

Kalman, when are you going to learn Australian?

Strewth, don’t tell the cobber to throw another lingo on the Barbie you drongo.

… Brother?

Anonymous wrote:

Kalman, when are you going to learn Australian?

I don’t think his liver can take that level of alcohol consumption to even attempt the Australian language.
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I’ve been watching the series, Mr Inbetween, so I have been getting a full dose of your language. It’s a really good series and I finally get to hear Damon Herriman speak normally and without an American accent.

Here’s a list of essential Australian TV you should watch:
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1. Xena Warrior Princess.
2. …
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No, actually there’s just the one

I would have thought of you as being a big Prisoner Cell Block H fan David.

Farscape was a Australian show so your list is still one. If you would like to dispute that, Xena veterans Judge Dredd(Karl Urban) and Homelander(Antony Starr) would like a word with you.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Anonymous wrote:

Kalman, when are you going to learn Australian?

‘t Is tijd voor Kalman om Nederlands te leren.

Anonymous wrote:

Tim wrote:

Kalman, when are you going to learn Australian?

‘t Is tijd voor Kalman om Nederlands te leren.

Oh no! Arjan has had stroke, too!

garjones wrote:

Absolutely. Welsh is almost entirely phonetic, the letter Y has some variation but it’s ironically very easy to pronounce if you just learn the alphabet.

It takes constant abuse from monoglot English speakers though despite the fact that they expect you to make sense of stuff like ‘cough/bough/rough’.

Hmong might beat Welsh for “almost entirely phonetic, but looks weird to speakers of other languages that use the Roman alphabet”. I mean, in the most popular writing system used by natives, the language is called “Hmoob” with the double o representing the nasalization, an the b representing tone. The ethnically Hmong Loatian Civil War general Vang Pao’s name would be Vaj Pov in the Hmong romanazation.

EDIT: NVM

I’ve been dissatisfied with the African language I’m doing. It’s not very useful in Queens (most immigrants to NYC from that part of Africa live in the Bronx) so I’ve changed to Amharic, as there is a significant Ethiopian community in Queens, actually most concentrated in my area. It’s also a Semitic language, so that gives me a leg up.

The positive element is whichever you choose you’ll never actually learn or use it, you’ll switch to something else after 5 days, so that should be viewed as a bonus in opening the options available.

Gar, there are some languages I’ve been learning for years or months, and some of them I get really advanced in. That’s the problem that made me make the switch: I do better with Indo-European or Semitic languages, and I want to do a language from Africa, and there’s one that’s spoken around my neighborhood AND is Semitic- that should have been my first choice- it’s just that because it’s Semitic there is a bit of bit of religious logic to say it’s not really “African”, but I realized that interpretation is wrong, and makes no sense

Actually, I just had a Tajiki Uber driver, and Bukharian is a dialect of Tajiki, and being from a former SSR, he knew Russian, and I was able to juggle those languages with English.

I wonder how an official standard works in a language that isn’t literary. (No official written grammar rules, no spelling rules, no dictionaries, etc.) I think that makes it impossible to have an official standard to compare the words in your head to. Basically whatever is in your head is the language.

I know that a lot of people here laugh at how many languages I’m learning (currently 16), but I saw a specialist in ASD last week. My mother asked if I was a linguistic savant, and he said no, savantism means no effort is needed, but that it’s not unusual for people with HFA to be able to learn many languages at a time, and have a seemingly superhuman ability to organize them mentally.

Me reciting a story in Proto-Indo-European, an ancient language reconstructed not from writing, but from languages that are recorded. It is the ancestor of most of the Languages of Europe, Armenian, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashto and related languages, North Indian Subcontinent, and Sri Lanka:

Reading Reconstructed Biblical Hebrew:

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Todd, DavidM

Anonymous wrote:

Me reciting a story in Proto-Indo-European, an ancient language reconstructed not from writing, but from languages that are recorded. It is the ancestor of most of the Languages of Europe, Armenian, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashto and related languages, North Indian Subcontinent, and Sri Lanka:

It sounds like a cross between Welsh and Klingon.

Not being funny, that’s really how it sounds to me.

The Oldest Words In The English Language

https://www.dictionary.com/e/w/

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Rocket

fell down a rabbit hole a bit. Looking up my name “Sean”

I’m Canadian born, dad from Scotland (and before that England, I guess, no reason to suspect Ireland).
Not a lot of talking about the old country (and you never truly know why a family moves to another continent…

Mom’s Canadian, Icelandic descent.
But really let’s face it. She had a thing for the first (Best?) James Bond, Sean Connery.
Growing up, there were lots of us (every year, every classroom).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean
The name originated in the Irish language. It is an adaption of the Anglo-Norman name Johan/John.

Sean is commonly pronounced “Shawn” (Seán), (and this is how I pronounce, hating the wrong spelling – Sean)
but in the northern parts of Ireland (owing to a northern dialect), it is pronounced “Shan”, “Shen” or “Shayn” (Séan, with the fada on the e instead of the a[citation needed]), thus leading to the variant Shane.

The name was once the common equivalent of John in Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland (largely identifiable with the Highlands and Islands), but has been supplanted by a vulgarization of its address form: Iain or Ian[citation needed]. When addressing someone named Seán in Irish, it becomes a Sheain (“a Ee-in”), and in Scotland was generally adapted into Scots and Highland English as Eathain, Eoin, Iain, and Ian (John has traditionally been more commonly used in the Scots-speaking Lowlands than any form of Seán). Even in Highland areas where Gaelic is still spoken, these anglicisations are now more common than Seán or Seathan.

So that was news to me.

To this day I still get a “see-awn” pronunciation, and a belligerent refusal to “get it” from (some) white people.
(wasn’t going to make that point until I typed, but wow, yes.
I’ll get off that, just don’t want to back down…)

Then I looked up Siobhan – most on this side need to read Shvaughn
What a beautiful name! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siobhan
Oh, it’s not like I just figured that out.
(I’ve known a Siobhan, and it’s very tiring for them to constantly teach.
I hope everyone with that name gets justice!)

Thinking about it (and don’t tell my ladyfriend), Sean & Siobahn go together better than ‘bacon & eggs’
We can unify the earth! Seriously, who wouldn’t vote for that?

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Sean Robinson wrote:

To this day I still get a “see-awn” pronunciation, and a belligerent refusal to “get it” from (some) white people.

The ‘sh’ form is not native to Celtic languages, if you see it used it’s most probably been imported from a germanic language. The Welsh equivalent name is Siôn, although the pronunciation is slightly different, rhyming with ‘cohn’. You’ll see the same ‘si’ pattern as in ‘Siobhan’.

I get your anger with people being belligerent like that. Wrong pronunciation when reading a language that uses different rules is perfectly understandable but it’s also incredibly basic to listen and repeat, especially with a name as simple as ‘Sean’.

I find this behaviour pretty exclusive to monoglot English speakers. My daughter has the Welsh name Cerys (rhymes with ferris, as in the wheel), in Malay the letter C has a ‘ch’ sound so her name is often read out as Cherris when it should be Kerris with a hard C. However as everyone here can speak at least 2 languages, often 3, once you correct it the first time there’s no problem, they get listen and repeat.

When I worked for a US company I had two bosses from Texas, the first one, a WASP, would continually get her name wrong and never learn however often I corrected him. The second was born in Mexico and a fluent Spanish speaker (although he was actually whiter than me with fair hair) and he naturally used ‘listen and repeat’ and always got it right.

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Sean Robinson wrote:

fell down a rabbit hole a bit. Looking up my name “Sean”

I’m Canadian born, dad from Scotland (and before that England, I guess, no reason to suspect Ireland).
Not a lot of talking about the old country (and you never truly know why a family moves to another continent…

Mom’s Canadian, Icelandic descent.
But really let’s face it. She had a thing for the first (Best?) James Bond, Sean Connery.
Growing up, there were lots of us (every year, every classroom).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean
The name originated in the Irish language. It is an adaption of the Anglo-Norman name Johan/John.

Sean is commonly pronounced “Shawn” (Seán), (and this is how I pronounce, hating the wrong spelling – Sean)
but in the northern parts of Ireland (owing to a northern dialect), it is pronounced “Shan”, “Shen” or “Shayn” (Séan, with the fada on the e instead of the a[citation needed]), thus leading to the variant Shane.

The name was once the common equivalent of John in Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland (largely identifiable with the Highlands and Islands), but has been supplanted by a vulgarization of its address form: Iain or Ian[citation needed]. When addressing someone named Seán in Irish, it becomes a Sheain (“a Ee-in”), and in Scotland was generally adapted into Scots and Highland English as Eathain, Eoin, Iain, and Ian (John has traditionally been more commonly used in the Scots-speaking Lowlands than any form of Seán). Even in Highland areas where Gaelic is still spoken, these anglicisations are now more common than Seán or Seathan.

So that was news to me.

To this day I still get a “see-awn” pronunciation, and a belligerent refusal to “get it” from (some) white people.
(wasn’t going to make that point until I typed, but wow, yes.
I’ll get off that, just don’t want to back down…)

Then I looked up Siobhan – most on this side need to read Shvaughn
What a beautiful name! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siobhan
Oh, it’s not like I just figured that out.
(I’ve known a Siobhan, and it’s very tiring for them to constantly teach.
I hope everyone with that name gets justice!)

Thinking about it (and don’t tell my ladyfriend), Sean & Siobahn go together better than ‘bacon & eggs’
We can unify the earth! Seriously, who wouldn’t vote for that?

I can relate. You have no idea how many people mispronounce my last name, Linietsky. It’s simple. Li-nee-et-skee. But so many people run the second and third syllables together. Li-net-skee or Li-nee-et-skee. And people always get the “a”s in Kalman wrong. It’s Kall-mawn or Kall-mun. But people say Kawl-man and things like that. One person heard my name and would not stop calling me “Calvin”.

And then there all the people who thought my father’s first name was a woman’s name, and would ask on the phone for “Mrs Linietsky”

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Sean Robinson

English accents are a lot harder to follow for me than American. I just heard someone on a podcast saying what I think was supposed to be “put on” but she dropped the t and it sounded like “poo on” which was funny.

 

English people also insert the r in odd places. At the end of a word often, but they also pronounce the the German ö with an r sound, meaning a name like Goethe is pronounced Goerthe. I don’t know why they do that. Americans may do that too, not sure. It seems similar to a phenomenon in Dutch where words that end in -er are pronounced with -ert, mostly in the Rotterdam accent.

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njerry, Todd

Bri ish

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njerry

[Todd]

Anonymous wrote:

English accents are a lot harder to follow for me than American. I just heard someone on a podcast saying what I think was supposed to be “put on” but she dropped the t and it sounded like “poo on” which was funny.

 

English people also insert the r in odd places. At the end of a word often, but they also pronounce the the German ö with an r sound, meaning a name like Goethe is pronounced Goerthe. I don’t know why they do that. Americans may do that too, not sure. It seems similar to a phenomenon in Dutch where words that end in -er are pronounced with -ert, mostly in the Rotterdam accent.

Regional dialects add an additional level.

Take, for example, the word “pecan”. In the eastern US, you will hear “pee-kan” and moving west, you hear “puh-kahn”. (I pronounce it the latter way.)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Todd.

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njerry

[Todd]

Todd wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

English accents are a lot harder to follow for me than American. I just heard someone on a podcast saying what I think was supposed to be “put on” but she dropped the t and it sounded like “poo on” which was funny.

 

English people also insert the r in odd places. At the end of a word often, but they also pronounce the the German ö with an r sound, meaning a name like Goethe is pronounced Goerthe. I don’t know why they do that. Americans may do that too, not sure. It seems similar to a phenomenon in Dutch where words that end in -er are pronounced with -ert, mostly in the Rotterdam accent.

Regional dialects add an additional level.

Take, for example, the word “pecan”. In the eastern US, you will hear “pee-kan” and moving west, you hear “puh-kahn”. (I pronounce it the latter way.)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Todd.

Yeah it may be there are American dialects that are completely incomprehensible for me, though in media it seems mostly the British and Irish accents I have trouble with.

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Todd

Anonymous wrote:

Yeah it may be there are American dialects that are completely incomprehensible for me, though in media it seems mostly the British and Irish accents I have trouble with.

They have there own dialects too so that could add to your troubles.

It is the variation. Arjan’s description of the dropped ‘t’ is called the ‘glottal stop’ and is most usually found in Cockney/London accents. In others like Received Pronunciation the ‘t’ is very clear, in fact moreso than standard American English where it tends to morph into an ‘r’ or an ‘n’ = ‘gorra’ ‘wanna’ for ‘got to’ ‘want to’.

As with Todd’s example if a regional accent is very strong people within the same country can have difficulty. There was a BBC sitcom in the 80s called Rab C Nesbitt which featured leads with very heavy Glaswegian accents and they added subtitles on some repeats after feedback from viewers in other parts of the country they couldn’t understand it.

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Todd

We have some very different dialects too. Even in the province where I lived all my life there are dialects I barely understand. There was a language shift in Holland in the 17th century when a lot of Flemish people moved up here, standard Dutch is heavily influenced by Flemish. The “old Dutch” dialects which keep a lot of features from before the language shift are very different, they still exist in smaller towns like Katwijk, Scheveningen, Zoetermeer and Aalsmeer but it’s dying out, often it’s just the older people that still know it.

 

Limburg has a strong dialect too, and some linguists say it’s a language of its own. The same is true of some accents in the East, that have some similarities with a German dialect called Platt Deutsch. And Frisian is a language of its own although it shares a lot of words with Dutch.

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Todd

The UK is famed for a huge number of different dialects, even with very small geographical spaces. Go from Liverpool to Manchester or Newport to Bristol, which are barely 30 miles apart and they sound completely different.

While the US definitely has significant variation too, you won’t confuse New York tones with Texas, I’d say it’s a lot less so than the UK and Ireland. It may be partly because the majority of its population growth has been in an era of mass transit with incomers from many areas moving around rather than a long history in one place.

It’s interesting that in peninsular Malaysia people can’t really tell where anyone is from by accent,  whether speaking English or Malay.

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Todd

Anonymous wrote:

English people also insert the r in odd places.

A lot of people I know say Warsh as in “warsh your hands”

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Todd

That’s not an R. Listen to Anna and the way she pronounces “krig!” (at around 0:55). Now that’s an R!

Rocket wrote:

A lot of people I know say Warsh as in “warsh your hands”

That guy who invented My Pillow used to hawk it on television commercials, praising the fact that “it’s machine-waRshable”.

I hate that man. Plus, he’s a Trump supporter, so…

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Rocket, Todd

It’s a very noticeable thing that the A and E vowel sounds vary a lot more in various British accents.

It’s the old marry/mary/merry thing where the three words in a usual American accent all sound the same. A Brit would say them all very differently. The added ‘r’ is probably a misconception really. In a word like ‘last’ spoken in an RP accent the A is elongated. The guy in this video explains it and bear in mind he has to go through 4 videos to cover all the differing vowel sounds.

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Todd

Old Frisian and Old English were basically the same language. If not for the Norman invasion, Frisian would be a Nederlandified English.

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Christian