>Share language learning experiences! >Ask questions about your target language! >Help people who want to learn a new language! >Participate in translation challenges or make your own! >Make frens!
FAQ U: >How do I learn a language? What is the best way to learn one? How should I improve on certain aspects? Read the damn wiki >Should I learn lang Y so I can learn lang X? No >What is the most useful language? Any dialect >What language should I learn? Any dialect
ffs i just clicked on that mega link and now my computer wont turn on
James Myers
>clicking unknown links Your own fault, user.
Anthony Wood
mine blew up and now displays an error saying that it's sent all my information to the CIA
Parker Butler
Hello everyone. Welcome to the /lang/focus thread and my name is Paul. Today's topic is the West Frisian language. West Frisian is a language spoken in the Friesland province of the Netherlands with around 470,000 native speakers. In the Netherlands, West Frisian is simply called Frisian to distinguish it from Dutch's West Frisian dialect. West Frisian is considered to be the language most similar to English if you consider Scots, which I made a video about almost two years ago, to be a dialect and not a separate language. Like English, Frisian is a Germanic language. Old English and Old Frisian were very similar, and during the Middle Ages, they experienced sound shifts that set them apart from other West Germanic languages like Old High German and Old Dutch. For example, the k sound turned into a ch sound when followed by certain vowels. Compare the Frisian word for cheese, tsiis, with the German and Dutch words Käse and kaas. Another development that English and Frisian experienced was almost completely dropping cases. In 1498, the Saxons replaced West Frisian with Dutch as the language used by the government. Even though Friesland changed rulers over time, Frisian was not reinstated as the official language, and it declined. However, in the early 1800s, large numbers Frisian authors and poets appeared and began a resurgence of the language, starting the New West Frisian era. Frisian has a process in which some falling diphthongs—ones in which the last vowel is lower than the first—are replaced with a rising diphthong, one with a higher second vowel. This change can occur based on the following consonant cluster or syllable. Listen to these two Frisian words and focus on the pronunciation of the vowels. The Question of the Day. For native speakers of West Frisian: What elements of Frisian do you think learners should focus on most? For English learners of Frisian: How similar do you find Frisian to English compared to other languages you've encountered?
> Dittsche: Wenn ich sicher bin. Das geht noch ?????. > Igo: ??????? auf dich, noch? Um die Zeit? Was macht ????? > Dittsche: Kurze ?????. > Wieso die haben noch auch? Ich kann doch Briefwahl machen. > Briefkasten werden sie ?????. Dann gehst du hin und werfe das aus an
>Mannen ser kycklingenar fran hans gamla blå bil Mannen ser kycklingarna från sin gamla blå bil. sin is the gentive pronoun we wanna use here
>Manga bilar vanta i trafik för vissa idiot kraschade (into) en vägg. Många bilar väntar i trafiken för att någon idiot körde in i en vägg(/mur*). We replace the verb 'krascha' with the verb 'köra' here in order to formulate ourselves like natives. A crash is already implied by such a telling wording like "drove into a wall".
* = it could be so that the sentence also implies a wall such a stone wall, which is called a 'mur' in Swedish. If it's the actual wall of a building then 'vägg' is correct.
Wow, you overestimated my Romanian skills I don’t speak it/understand it
Joshua Russell
>vägg haha väggina :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Carson Young
well shit, you read it very well you must have studied it a least a bit to be able to read it upon closer inspection you only slipped at "inter-regional" but the rest could've fooled me
I'm happy to know that, I like how it sounds I want to record more but it's going to be more obvious I don't speak it
Kevin Taylor
Good night
Oliver Reyes
>73737 pls do, I think it's awfully fun you can do such a good job at it lemme find you some proper cheesy romantic poetry (Eminescu) here romanianvoice.com/poezii/poezii/luceafarul.php
Jordan Bailey
>Când o femeie care nu studiază limba română vorbeşte mai bine decât un bărbat care traiește în Moldova....acuma voi plange în colţul meu NU TOCMAI POT DUMNEAZUUUUU DE CE DVS ATI FACUT ACEST LA MINEEEE
Nolan Walker
I am NGO MOLDOVA btw
Brody Nguyen
user I know you're the burger, don't feel bad lad and it's "nu mai pot" :3 plus, allegedly she can't speak it at all, just read it, and I think in that sense you're doing a lot better >de ce ati facut acest la mine I think you meant to say something more like "de ce mi-ati/mi-ai (aka Dumnezeu) facut asa ceva" as in "why did you do this to me" right? but you translated it too word-for-word
Random language fact for today before I sleep (as requested by my fren):
English is the only Germanic language that does not allow external possessors for inalienable possession. In English, the possessor marker must be placed within the noun phrase (NP), unlike for example German or Old English:
>Mir tut der Kopf weh. >My [literally 'to me'] head hurts.
>Mé wæs Déor noma. >My [literally 'to me'] name was Deor.
In Modern English '*To me was name Deor' does not work.
Interestingly enough, external possessors are considered a European trait – and not only within Indo-European languages – but the British Islands differ because English, Cornish and Welsh all require an internal possessor, and they are all spoken in Britain. In other words, Britain is being contrarian again.
>Ye, doing my MA in Late West Saxon highly based, but why would a foreigner want to do that
Jackson Reed
he's a very nice and hard-working burger doing God's work helping peeps in Rep. Moldova NGO user is cool
you sometimes switch to an accent from Moldova (not Republica Moldova, just the area of Romania called Moldova, still the same direction towards the north-east) and they have the cutest accent for women well, honestly all Romanian accents are sweet, except boring plain Bucharest accent
can't say that Inna is a good music choice but again proper pronunciation; although in this one it is a bit more apparent that you're foreign (some small mistakes), but I still wanna know how you got to this level desu
I'm not quite sure if I understand how this works. Isn't this structure similar to "look me in the eye" in English.
Asher Rogers
the reddit meme
Luke Walker
> Studying an emerging sign language won’t kill it – so what are linguists scared of? > Emerging sign languages could reveal how all language evolved – but keeping these fragile languages isolated for research may mean the people who rely on them lose out.
onnie de Vos was sitting on her hands. It was 2006, her first stay in the Balinese village of Bengkala, and visitors had come every night to her house, sitting on the floor of the front patio, eating fruit- or durian-flavoured candies and drinking tea. About eight to ten people were there now, hands flitting in the shadows, chatting away in Kata Kolok, the local sign language: Where is the next ceremony? When is the next funeral? Who just died?
Kata Kolok was created in Bengkala about 120 years ago and has some special features, such as sticking out your tongue to add ‘no’ or ‘not’ to a verb. And unlike American Sign Language (ASL), in which people move their mouths silently as they sign, you also smack your lips gently, which creates a faint popping sound, to indicate that an action has finished.
“If you walk through the village at six, people start to take their baths, getting ready for dinner,” De Vos recalls. “You can hear this sound – pah pah pah – all through the village.”
A graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at the time, De Vos had come to Bengkala to be the first linguist to map Kata Kolok’s grammar and list all of its signs. At that time, she says, it was “kind of untouched”, having emerged in an isolated community with a relatively high number of deaf people. Like similar ‘village sign languages’ that were starting to be identified in the 2000s, it was rich research material. She knew that being first to describe it would be a feather in her cap. But studying any phenomenon risks changing it.
Ethan Nelson
Very young languages offer an opportunity to see how languages emerge and evolve – and therefore what the origin of all languages might have been like. But some linguists have wondered how pure these circumstances really are. They worry that studying one of these sign languages – which may have only a handful of users – introduces an outside influence that could alter its development.
So De Vos was sitting on her hands – deliberately not using signs from other languages – when she was in Bengkala. If there was any chance that she had changed the course of Kata Kolok, her research would be less valid, and its relevance to learning about the natural evolution of languages diminished. The only problem is that shielding a language like Kata Kolok for scientific benefit might not actually be in the best interests of the community that uses it.
“Each of these communities is like a natural experiment. With our modern human brains, if you were to develop a language right now, what would it look like?” asks De Vos, who is now an assistant professor of linguistics at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “We have an opportunity to see multiples of those instances happen, and that’s really valuable.”
From Ban Khor, a sign language in Thailand, to Adamorobe in Ghana, linguists have described about two dozen such languages and suspect that many more exist. There are various names for them. Some researchers call them ‘young’ or ‘emerging’ languages, especially when the focus is on how they’re evolving. Others call them ‘village’ or ‘micro’ sign languages, which reflects the size and isolation of the communities where they spring up. A less frequent but no less apt term is ‘shared’ sign languages, because they’re often used by deaf and hearing people alike.
Ryan Taylor
Damn spanish looks hard as fuck glad its my first lang, it's true what they say that spanish is easy to learn at first but if u want to speak it properly it has harder grammar than even french
Asher Allen
They tend to arise in geographically or culturally isolated communities with an unusually high prevalence of deafness, often because of marriages between cousins. In such places, formal education isn’t commonly available and there’s no access to the national sign language, so over years or decades people have invented signs and ways to combine those signs.
Used by so few people, these fragile languages are endangered as soon as they appear. Someone else more rich and powerful is always eager to get rid of them or tell the signers to use some other language instead. Sometimes those powerful forces are deaf associations that look down on all things rural and remote.
And because the signers don’t always agree which signs mean what or how to use them, these languages can seem wobbly and half-baked. They’re undoubtedly languages in their own right, however, given that signers have used them their whole lives for everyday communication.
Studies of these languages have already revolutionised what was thought about sign languages. For instance, it was assumed that all sign languages, big or small, use the space around the body to represent time in the same way. The past is located behind the signer’s body, the present right in front and the future further in front. But village sign languages often do things differently: Kata Kolok, for example, doesn’t have a timeline at all.
De Vos is quick to say that Kata Kolok speakers still think and talk about the future and the past. There are just no designated linguistic structures to talk about them other than, for example, referring to events the speakers all know about.
Andrew Young
Studying village sign languages clearly reveals much about how sign languages are unique. But because most of these village sign languages appear to be only 30 to 40 years old, enough for three generations’ worth of evolution, they also raise the extraordinary opportunity to witness the birth of a language in real time. Researchers can follow how linguistic structures like word order emerge and change from the first generation to those that follow. Are these changes innate to our human linguistic abilities or do they come from somewhere else?
The opportunity to answer such questions has sparked interest in village sign languages among linguists, and the allure of ‘discovering’ a new language can be hard to resist.
Given the high stakes, and the potential to exert unwanted influence on these fragile languages, researchers have been arguing for years about how to handle them.
Ethan White
I've reached my 90 day streak in Duolingo today
Jose Gray
>low German So... Dutch?
Easton Hernandez
>fewer than 100 speakers >more than two dialects Why do tribes do this?
Angel Robinson
wtf spanish is easy. Understanding what people are saying is the difficult part.
I tried this with real Germans. After 2 sentences in terrible German, they will all switch to English. Also, the highest praise I ever got was > yes, that German was okay ...
Thomas Lopez
>tfw lost 44 day streak
Wyatt Garcia
Are the people he's talking to English speakers or German? If you sound confident a person who doesn't know the difference will probably think you sound good.
Colton Peterson
io non studia interlingua
Brody Perez
yeah im not sure what the comic was trying to say desu. "as long as you're confident, no one will care that you're retarded" is what i got from it
Daniel Stewart
why would you speak German to people who don't speak German
Gabriel Hall
>Oh, you study German, user? Say something to us! >Oh wow you sound really good! You're so smart!
Henry Hall
people like to showoff. i had a couple of dickheads do that to me in a restaurant i used to work at; they were obviously fluent in spanish and kept talking to me in spanish even though i had no idea what they were saying. after it was quite clear i didnt speak spanish, they persisted, it was very fucking insulting and i wish death upon them tb h
Luke Richardson
Serb bro, you got me bad. I went down a rabbit hole of script reading and before I knew it, I made an esperanto latin to tengwar transliterator. Except my parser was garbage and the font is ASCII. So now I'm going to be spending my free time looking into making a proper unicode font with ligatures and refactoring my parser so I can add more functionality. I hope you're happy.
not really even if ur shy with low ability and able to muster out a few phrases, it's enough to impress normies,
it really requires very little to impress normies.
i mean even im impressed when i hear a gringo speak broken spanish
it's more of a shock factor that impresses normies
Isaiah Lee
that doesnt mean much, ur probably reading way too into it and ur german is decent. I would literally get compliments in my german when I was A2 master race like i said it doesnt take much
Leo Flores
eh no sweaty unlike swedish and norwegian low german and dutch dont have such a high degree of mutual intelligibilty to consider them dialects of each other.
although interstingly east frisian language is actually low german that replaced the actual east frisian language in the 1700s and isnt mutually intellgible to west frisian or north frisian
the best way to distinguish what family a language comes from is by looking at its closed class words. since english still bears remnants of germanic inflection and roots within the auxiliary verbs, pronouns, determiners and others, it's most definitely a germanic language. the biggest difference for english to other germanic languages is lacking grammatical gender and case
The vocabulary of English is overwhelmingly of Latin-French orign with a good chunk of Greek too.
So there's Germanic words in common speech.
Easily substituted with Greek-Latin-French.
Levi Reyes
France is literally named after the Franks who spoke Frankish which is a Germanic language. Both English and French are Germanic languages.
Carson Evans
yeah but those are open class words, my argument was that since the closed class words still resemble that of a germanic language, there's no confusion in classifying it as a germanic language.
