Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

Chris B. 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.

Interesting idea!

"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)

All I can say is that I don't know about German. Never studied it, but it
seems hard from what I've read... the gender and cases. (I read somewhere
that Georgian would be easier for German speakers than English speakers...)

"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."

OK, just some ideas... these will need lots of additions and editing tho...

Hungarian.
Agglutination. Hungarian has lots of affixes (mostly suffixes) added to root
words to give them a more complex meaning, e.g. kéz 'hand' ~ kezem 'my hand'
~ kezemben 'in my hand'. [Tamás and others: Why the vowel shortening?]
Vowel harmony. The vowel of a suffix has to "agree" with the final vowel of
the root. Cf. kezemben 'in my hand' but házamban 'in my house'.
Noun cases. Hungarian has a gazillion noun cases (actually 20 or more) which
do the work of English prepositions.
Verb conjugation. Hungarian uses suffixes to conjugate verbs, and all the
arguments of the verb are included.
Interesting phonology. Hungarian has a lot of vowels and consonants, and a
40-letter alphabet (excluding the foreign letters <q, x, w, y>): a /O/ (for
some reason I think it's something different...for me it seems somewhere
between [O] and [V]...but I'm not too good at transcribing my pronunciation
in X-Sampa, so I'm prob'ly wrong here...maybe it's [Q]?), á /a:/, b /b/, c
/ts/, cs /tS/, d /d/, dz /dz/, dzs /dZ/, e /E/, é /e:/, f /f/, g /g/, gy
/J\/, h /h/, i /i/, í /i:/, j /j/, k /k/, l /l/, ly /j/, m /m/, n /n/, ny
/J/, o /o/, ó /o:/, ö /9/, o /2:/, p /p/, r /r/, s /S/ (an oddity of
Hungarian orthography [do any other languages use unadorned <s> for /S/? Why
does Hungarian use <s> as /S/ - any reason?]), sz /s/, t /t/, ty /c/, u /u/,
ú /u:/, ü /y/, u~ /y:/, v /v/, z /z/, zs /Z/.

I'll try Swahili:
Noun classes. Swahili classifies nouns into 16(?) classes, including humans,
animals, man-made objects etc. The noun's prefix (which marks the class)
changes for number (anything else?).
Verb conjugation. Swahili uses prefixes to conjugate verbs, and all the
arguments of the verb are included.

[A question: Why does Swahili not have tones, like all the other Bantu
languages?]

Tagalog:
Triggering. Tagalog is quite unlike Western languages in that it has a
trigger system, which marks the focus of an argument - even verbs can be
triggered(?). (Mark Line's explanation is better than mine...)
Argument marking. Verbs can take different prefixes for arguments, so 'to
buy' and 'to sell' are distinguished by different prefixes. (
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0405b&L=conlang&O=A&P=21380).

Trebor.