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Category: Other Languages
What does the Romanian language sound like to a foreigner?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUnFDbRClBI My prejudice going in, as someone exposed through Greek linguistics to written Aromanian language (which I know is not quite the same thing): Too many diphthongs Central vowels? How odd It’s Romance, it’s just got some odd sound changes My prejudice on hearing this: Too many diphthongs. I can’t hear the Romance at all. […]
Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages?
What Tomasz Dec’s answer to Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages? said. Icelandic is likely the most successful, as the poster-child of conservative intervention in language change in general. Lots of European languages have had bouts of this. German fought the good fight for a fair while, and their […]
What was the original word for “bear”?
What the OP may (or may not) be getting at is the fact that lots of Indo-European languages use descriptive words for bear, rather than the original Indo-European. This makes linguists surmise that there was a taboo about naming bears, so that euphemisms took the word’s place. Thus, the Germanic words for bear ultimately mean […]
How did the “Swastika”, which is said to be the symbol of the Aryan race, get its place in Hinduism?
As always, good outline in Wikipedia: Swastika To summarise: Lots of ancient civilisations used the swastika as a symbol, because it’s an easy shape to draw. Because lots of ancient Indo-European civilisations used it (including Indians, Greeks, Celts, and Armenians), German archaeologists assumed it was a symbol of the original Indo-European people. OTOH the Chinese […]
Which language that uses the Latin alphabet has the most accents and diacritics in the world?
Counting distinct diacritics on the Wikipedia page Diacritic , and ignoring the distinction between diacritics that generate new letters and diacritics that don’t: Vietnamese has nine: horn, circumflex, breve, bar (đ), acute, grave, tilde, underdot, and hoi (mini-question mark) Livonian has six (macron, umlaut, ogonek, superdot, tilde, hacek), but wins points for multiply stacked diacritics, […]
Will synthetic language speakers realize how inconvenient their mother tongues are after studying some analytic language?
Sure, I did. But I’m a linguist, so I don’t count. 🙂 Not that agglutinative/flexional is the same thing as analytic/synthetic, but Esperanto did spoil me for language learning in my teens, and I have read a Turkish grammar just for aesthetic enjoyment. And the most joy in the historical grammar of Greek is tracing […]
What does the Portuguese language sound like to foreigners?…
In my considered opinion, Portuguese sounds like a drowsy headcold. I randomly surveyed a representative sample of objective language critics (my wife), and have the additional answer “tongue-twisted”. Answered 2015-12-18 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-does-the-Portuguese-language-sound-like-to-foreigners/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Why does the pronunciation of the letter ‘J’ vary so much throughout different languages?
Because /j/ (English y) is a palatal phoneme, and palatals are historically unstable. (See for example Nick Nicholas’ answer to Linguistics: In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?) Rob Kerr’s answer is correct in principle, but the variation between German, English, French, […]
How widely were German, French and English each used as languages of science in the Europe of the 19th and early 20th centuries?
Greek linguists at the time mostly did German, and some did French. Of the main antagonists, Psichari only wrote in French—but then again, he lived in France. Hatzidakis mostly wrote in German, though he could write in French if he had to. When I was studying in Greece, I heard distant echoes of a “German […]
What language uses 7’s and !’s?
Squamish language uses <7> conventionally to substitute for IPA <ʔ>, and I can imagine other languages doing so if their Romanisation was influenced by linguists. Squamish doesn’t use <!>, which turns up in Khoisan languages for clicks (Exclamation mark). Not convinced there’s a language that uses both, but who knows… For the same reason of […]