Alright. Sorry for that, I assumed it was another of those "Kurds does not exist, they are nothing but mountain Turks"-comments.

Just a question because I'm curious: what ever happened to Esperanto?

It was supposed to be a universal language for everyone to learn in addition to their own language, and that sure didn't work out well at all.

I'm not ignorant, man. There are alot of people on this board from other countries with whom I've had lengthy conversations with about their culture.

I'm 'culture hungry'. Like a bottomless pit, too. I could go on all day with someone about their culture.

It was a dumb idea anyway

Just like Volapuk.

Yeah, I translated the Google homepage into Esperanto, it sure didn't look like a language I'd want to learn.

According to Wiki, it contained vocabulary from Romantic and Germanic languages, but with the Phonology of Slavic languages...


... Who and why would anyone construct such a thing?

Volapuk, however, has a funny backround. Apparently, some Catholic priest in Germany had a dream where God told him he wanted him to construct an international language. It contained vocab' from English, German and French.

Unfortunately, Volapuk was a classic example of what we call 'Fail', and it generally replaced by 'easier' constructive languages like, Esperanto, Ido and some weird shit called 'Latino sino Flexione'...

... That last one sounds kinda sexy for some reason.

I tried seeing how a Wikipedia page would look like. Fuck, that language looks so shitty, it even has bits of Turkish and whatnot. Also, having a "j" in almost every word is incredibly annoying.

Yeah, I'd rather learn Welsh than that. And Welsh has some weird wording, like the town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Pronounced 'Khl-an-fai-r-poo-khl-goo-in-gih-khl-gog-erich-oo-ee-rn-drob-oo-khl-khlant-ee-see-lee-oh-gog-og-okh'.


Yeah, Welsh is alot of hacking and spitting, but when spoken fluently, it's fucking beautiful sounding.

I actually think Welsh is interesting though.

I am nearly fluent in French although I still have a noticeable accent. I'm able to piece together and understand fragments of written Spanish. It would be interesting to learn a language that isn't Latin-based, but I don't know if I have enough patience for it.

I wonder. So many people speaking French.

I wonder what language the majority of MA users speak daily.

French

It'd be nice!

That may just be wishful thinking, however.

Actually what I mean to say was that I myself speak French as a daily language and I'm pretty sure Morrigan, Evenfiel and Hellblazer do as well.

Quick linguistic question: are there any languages commonly in use today with a smaller alphabet than English? The fact that English is (ordinarily) devoid of accent marks entirely seems to make it the smallest out there.

In italian alphabet J, K, W, X, Y are usually considered as foreign letters and à, è, é, ì, ò and ù are always considered simple variants. So the italian one can be considered smaller.

I'd say a good percentage of users from Canada are from Québec, and these people speak French.

I'm sure that if you look at some of the former Soviet countries in Asia, the ones who use their own variant of the Cyrillic alphabet, there are some that actually have fewer letters than Latin based scripts.

Edit: Btw, how are you, man? I haven't seen or spoken to you since Mike's party last.. shit, last summer, actually.

I am fluent in French and English, I can express myself equally fluently in both languages. I have been studying Spanish for 4 years in school, I can express myself moderately. I also can speak very basic German.

Yea, the italian alphabet consists of 21 letters, and I'm pretty sure it's the shortest one in Europe.

I speak French and English perfectly (native), pretty good Portuguese (living there), basic Spanish and acceptable German. I also studied Latin for about 2 years and am currently wondering if I should learn Italian, which sounds nice and should be easy since I have a knack with latin languages.

You should. "The study of Italian sharpens the mind".

Totally! I went to Spain sometimes and just spoke Portuguese with an accent and I got along just fine.

Well, I´m Brazilian, so Portuguese is my mother language, and English won´t be listed for obvious reasons, so... yeah, I don´t speak any other language, but I always wanted to speak Italian.

The Rotokas language has a much smaller alphabet than English does, with only twelve letters: <P T K G V S R A E I O U>. There are languages with fewer phonemes, but I don't know of any that are written.

Wow, a 12 letter alphabet sounds nice.

Apart of spanish and engrish I can also understand Portuguese

I have always found it bizarre that the portuguese understand spanish faaaar better than vice-versa.

Same thing with Danish and Norwegian people. They seem to understand us really well, but many Swedes I know can't understand shit of what they are saying. Norwegian is easier though.

I was under the impression that Swedish was the easiest of the three, both to understand and speak. I can already understand quite a bit of Swedish (written only) based on both my knowledge of German and English. Same thing with Portuguese; I can understand pretty much all of it as long as it is in written form, based only on my Spanish.

For me, as I speak Swedish, I think it is easier than the other languages. Danish has a lot of swallowing and so, quite hard to hear what they say. I think we speak rather clearly, maybe that's why they understand us well. I once spoke to a Danish guy in Swedish and he replied in English

I've read somewhere that norwegians understand swedish better than swedes understand norwegian because of TV channels/programs. Swedish TV was much more present in Norway, which helps them understand it better, while norwegian TV wasn't as present in Swden. Same thing with Denmark maybe?
Obviously I have no idea myself, I just read it somewhere. I don't know which of two countries is 'bigger' but that seemed a pretty good explanation to me.

Haha, that phonetic pronounciation isnt even close, I can say that place name. Well I should be able to really being Welsh and all. Not a fluent Welsh speaker though but I am learning, its a difficult language though.

Then feel free to correct me.

No you can't, Chuck Norris is the only man who can actually speak in Braille

fucking liar.

It would be helpful if he did.

I could try but thing is in Welsh there's letters like LL, CH and NG which I cant really describe the sound of. Halfway down this page there's a link to someone saying it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpw ... iogogogoch