Which languages do you know?

[Dakkus]

When I was in turkey for a tour there the guide told us that the Turkish language is really close to the Finnic, is it true or not?

There are a lot of similarities. No scientist have been able to prove that Finnish and Turkish have any common roots, but to those who speak both languages fluently it looks quite clear.

[milanocapitale]

cool!U are so far each others!

[goldwood]

Indeed very impressive... Aren't there common grammar things with Japanese too?

For me:

French: Well it's a bit normal, living in Wallonia I speak it every day.
English I've had it at school for 8 years and my mothers speaks it fluently so I guess I'm not bad at it
Dutch Did 2 years at school, I can speak a bit. I'll maybe go on with Dutch next year.
Spanish I have it at school for 1 year, it's really nice. I can understand important things; French helps.
Waloon Hehe My grandfather always speaks it so I can understand almost everything It's getting very rare though.
Latin Had 4 years at school, loved it. I can still understand texts.

I'd love to learn Mandarin and Finnish for EBT So anyone wants to teach me haha?

[Dakkus]

Indeed very impressive... Aren't there common grammar things with Japanese too?

Well.. In theory yes..
There are three often used ways of doing what English does with prepositions such as "in", "under" and so on.

For example English puts that thing before the word. An example: "In a house"

Finnish (and Japanese) then put the thing in the end of the word. An example: "Talossa" (think of it as "Talo ssa" and you might get the point). In English that would be "Housein"

Then there are such things as changing the middle of the word. For example, in Germanic languages a verb has earlier been often put to past tense by changing for example "i" in the middle to "a" or something like that. An example: "To sit" vs. "sat".

Both Finnish and Japanese add the things to the end of the word. But that alone isn't a very big thing.
What I find more interesting is that Finnish and Japanese actually sound very similar. When listening to some Japanese songs I could imagine a Finnish meaning to every word, even though they don't mean anything in Finnish. It's total gibberish to my brain, but the words are like Finnish. Only the meanings are missing ;)
However, also that is probably rather pure luck.

The reason to this seems to be that both languages fancy using clear consontant-vowel-consonant-vowel rythm. Japanese alphabets (katakana and hiragana) actually don't even allow writing two different consonants after each other. Each consonant automatically carries a vocal in it. If you try writing "Professor" in Japanese letters, it'll end up reading "Porofessoru".
Finnish does - or at least has done - the same thing. Double consonants, at least in the beginning of the word - is not more than a couple of decades old thing.

[marcus92]

Dutch: Of course
English: I have learned it on school for 5 years, and I can speak it good.
French: At school for 2 years, I can only the basic-french
German: From holidays in Switserland and for 1 year on school, and I can speak it passable.

[goldwood]

Thanks Dakkus for your explanation, it's very interesting. I'm less stupid now

[arathorn]

[Slightly off-topic]Dakkus mentioned double consonants and that reminded me off old finnish conversation. I have translated it to english for you:

"kokoo koko kokko."
"ensemble the whole bonfire."
"koko kokkoko?"
"the whole bonfire?"
"koko kokko"
"the whole bonfire."

[/Slightly off-topic]

[thomas]

Japanese alphabets (katakana and hiragana) actually don't even allow writing two different consonants after each other. Each consonant automatically carries a vocal in it.

rather "after it", except the final "n".

If you try writing "Professor" in Japanese letters, it'll end up reading "Porofessoru".

"purofessoru"

[Aaron]

Indo-Europeans are very likely to categorise to the same group all such non-Indo-European languages which have something common with each other. In fact, this "common" thing between two languages is usually a character which is missing from Indo-European languages.

Some characters of Indo-European languages:

- using of prepositions
- in a third person the person's gender is indicated
- the stress can be somewhere else than on the first syllable of the word
- etc.

My point is that if there are two languages which are using postpositions and the word for he and she is the same, they are not necessarily anyhow related to each other.

[pastel]

Portuguese - Native language
English - Quite well
Castellano - (Only practice on hollidays: Joé, que caló!)
French - (7 years of Alliance Française)
Danish - (Lived there 1 year)
Latin -(2 years on high school)

And I can understand Norwegian, Swedish and some Italian

Pastel

[BadGirl]

Portuguese - of course
Spanish - 2 years of study
French - fluent
English - fluent
Latin - 5 years of study

[YvesD_fr]

[quote="tinka"]I could see that some regular posters here post in different languages.
I'm curieus how many languages do you speak and how many do you write?

Hello:

French = mother tongue
English = fluent
Spannish (castillano) = Average but enough to get by anywhere in the hispanic world
Italian = just a bit (what I call survival level)
Morse code = used to be fluent

Cheers,

Yves

[Matesi1976]

Hello everybody!
The languages I know are the following:
Greek: Native
English: Fluent
German: Intermediate
Japanese: Intermediate
French: Basic

I also claim to have limited knowledge of a few other languages, especially when reading texts written in them. But I would really need to work harder on them.

Finally, let me wish to everybody a Happy New Year! May 2006 be full of health, joy and happiness, as well as of interesting topics for us to discuss!

Stamatis

[MetalAtog]

Portuguese - that one is a no-brainer
English - 7 years of study in school but mostly learned through music and movies
French - 3 years in school, rarely use it, forgot most stuff but still can understand it a bit
Spanish - very similar to portuguese, can't say I speak the kanguage but understand it quite well

[eurojuanmi]

I know spanish, english, french and some calí (gipsy language)