On Feb 10, 2007, at 9:03 AM, Adam Goddard wrote:
> Ich spreche ein bischen Deutches,
> É parlo un po di Italiano (Toscano),
> Je parle un peu Français,
> أتكلم قليل من اللغة العربية Atakalamo kalilan
> mena alogha al Arabiah,
> ואני מדבר כיצת עברית Ve ani mediber kitsat Ivrit
> (Hebrew),
> Or me toratora Hindi bolta-hung.
> Are you gonna call me weird, too? ;-)
Yes, certainly, you weird language genius ;-) . I had an Australian
coworker for a while. It was nice to listen to his pronunciation.
I was told that in Russian, pretty much nothing is pronounced the way
it is written.
I guess my comment on German being weird was more aimed at the social
implications of making girls an "it" instead of a female. The whole
three-gender system of nouns in German seems to have no rules
whatsoever. Plus it does not borrow from French or Italian as one may
hope. So why in the world is the moon male in German and female in
French (and a thing in English)? And why is it exactly the other way
around with the sun? I'll never know.
I had six years of Latin at school which seems more like a
programming language in comparison, and I started some Japanese,
failing miserably (I guess I am too old). I bet that some of the
languages on your list, not being "Western", are very peculiar.
Matthias
---- http://robowerk.com/ -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/Received on Sat Feb 10 05:36:59 2007
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