Re: "Usefull languages"

On Tue, 12 Feb 2002 22:54:14 +0100, Florian Rivoal
<florian.rivoal@...> wrote:

>Hi every one
>
>When it comes to conlanguing, I think it is very usefull to have a large
>knowledge about natlangs. It woudl like to know what language you think is
>usefull to know. Not if it is spoken by many people or any thing like this. I
>mean Languages that are exotic enough to make you think about features that tdo
>not exist in your mother language, and that could be usefull for conlaging. I
>will start with my own list of languages I know, and what i like
>them ofr
>
>
>*Japanese for :
I'll also include Japanese, for its syntax among other things. It's a great
example of syntax that is at the same time reasonably sensible and
radically different from English.

Korean, for its unique system of writing, which is well suited for the
Korean morphology.

Arabic, Hebrew, or both, for the idea of consonant roots.

Dyirbal or Yidiny, if I can ever find either of those books. These are
Australian languages that were documented by R. M. W. Dixon, and quite
different from typical European languages in all respects.

For exotic sounds: Zulu or Xhosa, Navajo, Vietnamese, Georgian.

Any language for which you can find a good dictionary with more than
one-word glosses.

On Tue, 12 Feb 2002 23:01:50 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>By the way, the French orthography is not that bad and pretty phonemic (and
>good at showing some grammatical alternations that would look rather strange if
>one were to adopt a phonetic orthography :)) ). Compared to the English
>orthography, it's the IPA :)) .
>
>Christophe.
Compared to English, almost any modern language looks like the IPA! Except
Tibetan (and possibly Burmese; I don't know much about it, but it looks
hard to read). While few languages are as easy to read as Finnish or Czech,
there can hardly be many languages with as many pitfalls as English when it
comes to spelling.

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