Re: Favourite Language Group?

> What's everyone's favourite language group(s)?
I suppose I'm largely an Indo-European guy -- my favorite groups are definitely
Celtic, Germanic and Romance. Well, for Celtic it's definitely all of them; for
the latter two it's most but not all of them. In Germanic, for example, I just
don't like standard "hochdeutsch" German, which I find aesthetically greatly
displeasing and really boring; however, a lot of the "peripheral" or
nonstandard varieties of German -- Swiss German, Luxembourgish, Alsatian, etc.
-- are absolutely fascinating.

Apart from that, I can name individual languages more than language groups -- I
quite like Persian and Kurdish, for example, but I don't know anything about
any other Iranian languages, so I don't know if I can say I like the Iranian
group or just those two. Outside of I-E langs, the same goes for e.g. Uralic
languages -- I really like Estonian and Hungarian, but I know nothing about any
other languages in the family besides those two and Finnish, so I couldn't say
whether I like Uralic langs in general, or just Estonian and Hungarian. I don't
care for Finnish; it's so "rat-tat-tat"-y sounding. Estonian is way cooler: it
has all the same neat grammatical features that Finnish has, but it both looks
and sounds much nicer.

I'm also really fascinated with the grammatical structure of the Turkic languages,
but I don't find them very pleasing either to hear or to look at. Now a
language with their grammar but with a completely different phonology and
lexicon would be a nifty project! :-) Basque is another language whose
structure is fascinating, and also looks cool (in a z-y and x-y kind of way)
but is just not nice to listen to.

All the above are just my own opinions and reactions, of course, subject to my own
occasionally questioned aesthetic tastes. But it certainly is interesting to
read other people's responses to such questions.

Thomas