In fairness that is the same for a lot of languages as I am fairly sure Goodbye is God by ye or God be with you or something along those lines.Th3Ch33s3Cak3 said:The Irish language has so many exceptions for the verbs, there's no real point in having the rules there in the first place.
It's also impossible to have a normal conversation without mentioning God. 'Dia duit' means 'hello'. But a literal tranlation is 'God be with you'. Not only that, but if someone says 'Dia duit' you can't reply with 'dia duit'. You have to reply with 'Dia is Muire duit(God and Mary be with you)'. And if somone says 'Dia is Muire duit', you have to reply 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig duit(God,Mary,Patrick). And if somone says 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig duit' you have to reply, 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig is Niamh duit(God,Mary,Patrick,Niamh)' . And if someone says 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig is Niamh duit', you have to reply 'Dia is Muire is Padraig is Niamh is Peadar duit(God,Mary,Patrick,Niamh,Peter)' Thankfully, there's nothing after that .
What language do you speak exactly?GrungyMunchy said:Wait, are you serious? English uses nowhere near as many different words as the majority of latin languages. A verb in English has 4 or 5 different variations to aknowledge time and person, in my language it has 67. Seriously, English is one of the easiest languages I've ever encountered.
English still retains three cases--subjective, objective, and genitive/possessive--but we only bother to mark them on the personal pronouns (he/him/his, she/her/hers, etc.). Everything else is handled with word order and prepositions, with a vestigial genitive case marker ('s) for nouns. English has gotten pretty far away from its inflectional roots and become much more of an isolating/analytic language.Kathinka said:oh, also we have seven causes. take that, inferior germans with your four not even talking to you english guys with a single one..
Seriously? What is that sentence? I want to know!SpadeJester said:Russian, the language in which you can write a sentence full of swears and it won't be swearing.
Is that strange enough for you?
I had poor Irish teachng in primary so now i'm doing ordinary for the leaving.Glademaster said:In fairness that is the same for a lot of languages as I am fairly sure Goodbye is God by ye or God be with you or something along those lines.Th3Ch33s3Cak3 said:The Irish language has so many exceptions for the verbs, there's no real point in having the rules there in the first place.
It's also impossible to have a normal conversation without mentioning God. 'Dia duit' means 'hello'. But a literal tranlation is 'God be with you'. Not only that, but if someone says 'Dia duit' you can't reply with 'dia duit'. You have to reply with 'Dia is Muire duit(God and Mary be with you)'. And if somone says 'Dia is Muire duit', you have to reply 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig duit(God,Mary,Patrick). And if somone says 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig duit' you have to reply, 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig is Niamh duit(God,Mary,Patrick,Niamh)' . And if someone says 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig is Niamh duit', you have to reply 'Dia is Muire is Padraig is Niamh is Peadar duit(God,Mary,Patrick,Niamh,Peter)' Thankfully, there's nothing after that .
OT: Irish isn't actually too bad for learning stuff like verbs in my opinion until you go past the basics. Once you start to do the genitive cases, plurals, proper syntax, past and present participles then it goes out the fucking window. Although to be honest I think a lot of these problems come from bad teaching at the foundation of the language in primary school and certain patterns not being made clear and assumed to be known in primary school level.
by speak you mean pronounce, right? Because english is quite easy if you speak a language like spanish, portiguese, italian, french, or other more complex ones (those that have more rules).Iron Mal said:Well for English I can say that one of the fascinating things about English is how it evolved over time from us taking bits and pieces from other languages and assimilating them into our own (English actually contains words taken straight from other languages too, including Arabic and various European languages), in short, English is quite literally a 'bastard language'.
Not only that but English is widely reputed to be amongst one of the hardest languages to learn to speak due to the wide amount of idiotmatic language we posess as well as the fact that English is one of the least consistant languages around (there are numerous exceptions to grammatical and puncuation related rules in English as well as several words that sound the same but can have completely different meanings).
Sure, it might not be exotic like Cantonese Chinese but you'd be suprised by the amount of intricacy and history behind English.
I did not know that and thank you for correcting me (learn something new every day).SckizoBoy said:No, it's still widely spoken, and is the second most prevalent of the Sino-languages (70 million speakers, last time I checked) and still the most common Chinese language spoken outside China/Taiwan (Mandarin's slowly catching up thanks to migration patterns).
I've tried learning quite a few languages in the past (including French, Spanish, Latin, Japanese and even a small bit of Klingon for a few giggles) and haven't had a whole lot of success with any of them.Still, regarding the rest, you make a fair point, especially regarding the difficulty in learning new languages at all. The difficulty encountered is merely a different sort. With Cantonese it's primarily to do with phonology, while English, its grammatical exceptions and contractions as you mention (as well as numerous other features).
This does make me wonder then how Cantonese has been carried and kept alive through the various generations when it for the most part must be transered and taught from person to person through the way of word of mouth (a method that in most cases would logically result in radical changes and adaptations being made to the language to match the technology and social climate of today).However, as a departure from my question, these would be reasons why the languages are fascinating rather than necessarily strange. Because, as a spoken language, everything you say in English can be easily written down (with the possible exception of some onomatopoeic exclamations/expressions) whereas so much of spoken Cantonese literally cannot be written down. Granted, this may be due to the vagaries of written Chinese, being non-alphabetised or having syllable symbols (e.g. kana for Japanese), but it's still an aspect that one may identify as lunatic(!)
Thank you for that info! I'll probably have to read a few danish names from history differently now.mellemhund said:Haha - i get this with kindle text-to-speech all the time!Ghengis John said:What's weird about english? Too many contextual uses of words. Eat lead. I'll lead. Try interpreting the meaning of "They read." on it's own without any context.
In my native tongue - danish - we have a habit of not pronouncing words the same way we write them. Like making a 'g' silent if it comes before an 'e' in the last syllable. But if you ever read a book on danish grammar, it wouldn't tell you.
It's mostly too unimportant.aashell13 said:your mother's parents would be your maternal grandparents, and your father's parents would be your paternal grandparents. Nobody uses this much though, and I'm not sure why.
"Extended" and "nuclear" family.Renegade-pizza said:This may not exactly be strange, but Afrikaans actually has two words for family. "Familie": Your entire group that shares a common ancestor and "Gesin": i.e. Mom, dad and siblings. I'm actually surprised that English doesn't also have two words for it.
I wonder about this too.Nickolai77 said:I'm English, and personally i find it weird and strange how other European languages like French and German assign genders to nouns. Seriously, how can desks, chairs, radiators etc be masculine and feminine? What's the point? Why not just settle on one word that means "the"?
What.Queen Michael said:The Swedish word for "chocolate bar", chokladkaka, is by an amazing coincidence also our word for "doing the twist on a sinking ship in springtime while you're wondering if that spot you've got on your back is something malignant." It's weird.
The.Randomologist said:I made it up, in its entirety.
Wibble!
Fluffernutters.SpadeJester said:Russian, the language in which you can write a sentence full of swears and it won't be swearing.
Is that strange enough for you?
English: fighting consistency from day 1.Dyme said:Yea, I know that I spelt it wrong. It was just the closest word I knew in terms of looks. And I wouldn't ever have dreamt (or dreamed?) of pronouncing gaoler jailer. I would have pronounced it like goaler.uzo said:You spelt it wrong - the word is 'gaol'. The strange thing is in your first sentence you spelt it correctly, but then mixed it up in the next sentence.Dyme said:I will help the English people out and point out what is actually strange about your language.
I read Game Of Thrones, and read the word gaoler.
I thought "What? Goal? Does this have anything to do with goals?"
Turns out you pronounce it jailer. Which makes sooo much more sense.
The strangest part about English is how you pronounce and write your shit.
Let's pretend you are learning English and you know how to pronounce "owl" and you know how to pronounce "cowl".
You find the word "bowl".
What do you think? How would you pronounce it?
As a side note, are you dyslexic? I remember hearing something somewhere that English is the language with the largest number of dyslexics - and scientists are starting to think it's the peculiar structure of English spelling that causes it. Dyslexics are a constant percentage in all demographics - so why else would we see more in English, yet it is almost unheard of in, for example, Japanese?
I am not dyslexic, but I really can see why there would be more dyslexics in English. In German ~every word is pronounced the same way it is written.