Everybody here speaks English. Many of us speak one of the main languages of the world.
I would like to know whether many people here speak (or are learning) some of the “off-the-wall” languages from this planet of ours (and let me say that it is not my intention to demean any of those languages by calling them “off-the-wall”!)
I will open the thread with myself: I speak 13 languages so far, and number 14 is going to be Basque (Euskera). I am currently getting the basics of the language… And let me tell you, it is absolutely fascinating…
So, what about you? Anybody here speaks (or is learning) any language that is, let’s call it… “unusual”?
Hm. When I was doing my Ph.D. work I had to do a structural study of a non-European language, and I chose Swahili. Not really very weird, just not one that many people in the midwest have studied.
Then I had to do a field linguistics class, and the native speaker the professor found spoke Tigrinya. So I’ve done a structural study of that.
I studied Irish Gaelic for awhile and at one point was able to conduct very basic conversations in it.
Unfortunately, not much opportunity to practice it, nor much use for it otherwise. The classes I took were by native speakers, which was wonderful, and heavily emphasized speaking it, which was also wonderful, but left me pretty much illiterate in it.
I did find studying it to be fascinating, it was much different than the French I has previously studied, and much different from English in many respects.
Breton is the most obscure one I could probably carry on a conversation in. Not much opportunity to practice speaking, but I can read and write it pretty well. (Edit: I’ve learned Welsh pretty fluently, which has a very similar vocabulary and grammar.)
I’m fairly fluent in gibberish. I can interpret it well, but I’m still improving my speaking skills, occasionally I’ll slip up and say something comprehensible.
Congratulations JoseB on speaking 13+ languages! I would love to learn Basque. I understand it is the only language that doesn’t have a root. Which is very intriguing.
I speak Maya Yucateca. Which is the indigenous language here in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The grammar is similar to English, but it very descriptive, hence beautiful.
I taught myself to read Old Occitan using William Paden’s excellent grammar. I didn’t have much luck trying to talk to the one Occitan speaker I had never met. Unsurprisingly, things like amor de lonh don’t come up much in casual conversation.
I read koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew, as well as Latin. However, I have taught a couple of classes at SF/Fantasy conventions in Quenya (Tolkien’s Elvish).
Every few years I try to teach myself Egyptian hieroglyphics. I generally use Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar, but this is also a good text. The problem is that I have no memory for languages for some reason – one of the brain circuits I guess I’ve lost. Plus practicing involves drawing the pictograms and I especially suck at that.
But it’s a fascinating script. It uses an alphabet plus symbols for syllables as well as words, class identifiers, etc. And there’s a fair amount of redundancy so it will spell out a word or part of a word and then use a symbol to identify exactly which word is meant. It’s been a few years now so I might be screwing some of this up.
Anyway, at one point I was working for a company that was using an Egyptian inscription in their advertising. It was a legit photo of an inscribed relief from the Metropolitan Museum of Art IIRC, so I decided I try to translate it. It almost seemed to make sense in the context of the advert so I went to the ad dept and asked if the photo had been cropped.
It turned out that it had and they gave me the whole relief that had been used. I did my best at the translation and it sort of made sense so I was very impressed. They’d obviously gotten someone from the museum to pick something that was at least sort of apropos.