On 10/02/2007, at 9:21 PM, matthiasm wrote:
> 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.
If you're Aussie or from most western countries, I sound aussie, but
at work I always get the scottish and irish people asking if I'm
celtic (Gordon(Scot) & McCabe(Eire) clans - I wear Gordon kilt :-P)
Being 4 or 5 generations Australian citizens, it's hard for me to
pick it up in my or my family's voices, but apparently the celtic
sound is just barely there, lol.
> 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.
English's gender system is rudimentarily basic. European, Asian and
Middle Eastern languages have gender systems not always based on the
physical gender of the object being discussed, but can come from a
variety of factors including word origins (especially for words
borrowed from completely different languages) and mostly on
individual dialects/regional variations.
> 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.
Yeah, the aramaic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, are very interesting
because of the sounds western speakers are not used to making, having
to read & write from right to left, and being thought of as a spy if
you understand both languages, lol. ;-)
Regards,
- Adam Goddard
-- 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 06:46:03 2007
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