Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

I once had an idea of indicating, for every possible
language, what interesting (or exotic) concepts one
can find in the grammar of this language.

For ex:
- portuguese: has future infinitive; inserts object
pronoun inside the verbal form
- german: sends verbal form as far away as possible in
subordinates
- norwegian (and danish, swedish... and romanian): has
postposed article
- ancient greek: has dual, aorist, etc.
- brittonic: has singulative
- russian: has couples of verbs to express aspect
- etc, etc. (georgian and basque of course would need
special chapters)

--- Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...>
wrote:
> I was thinking of making a list of easy and
> interesting (from a
> linguistic point of view) languages for people who
> speak various
> languages to learn, if someone hasn't done it
> already, and putting it up
> on my free webspace (which is doing nothing useful
> at the moment
> really... I think there's an old page there). Anyone
> think it'd be a
> good idea of want to suggest languages to go in
> either category for
> native speakers of their language? I thought that
> the two categories
> would vary from language to language, since what's
> easy and what's
> interesting depends upon what you intuitively feel
> is the default.
>
> For English I guess:
>
> Relatively easy:
> Spanish
> French
> Frisian
> German (? Never learned much, I think that might
> actually not be that
> easy for an english speaker, even though the two
> languages are not that
> distantly related)
> (Lots more... Suggestions welcome)
>
> Relatively Interesting Languages:
> Hungarian (+ Other Fino-Ugric languages)
> Swahili (+ Other Bantu Languages)
> Tagalog (+ Austronesian Languages)
> (Lots more again...)
>
> I'd write a blurb (or add one if someone else wanted
> to write it) as
> well explaining why each is in the category it is.
> So if anyone thinks
> this is worthwhile I'd be grateful for opinions and
> suggestions from
> other people more knowledgeable than I, and also
> people whose native
> tongue is other than english on what languages their
> native language
> speakers might find easy and interesting. I just
> thought it'd be useful
> for people who wanted to learn a foreign language
> for the fun of it on
> the list, if they could see a list like that with
> explanations of why a
> particular language was interesting, etc, see if
> anything caught their eye.
[...]

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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