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RE: How many languages do you speak??
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[Poll]
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How many languages do you speak??
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Total Votes : 34
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(last vote on : Oct. 2 2016 9:31:43)
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Dudnote
Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 13 2007
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin Speaking of the numeral system, here's an interesting theory from Malcolm Gladwell's book "the Outliers": http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/ I don't know what it's worth but it's an interesting take on the way language can inform other individual abilities. In French from France (it's not the same in Belgium, where their numbers make a bit more sense), we use Arabic numerals, but the full written (and spoken) form of the numbers can get pretty ridiculous. If you translate litteraly the parts that make up the word, 60 is sixty; 70 is sixty ten (soixante-dix); 80 is four twenty (quatrevingt); 90 is four twenty ten (quatrevingt-dix).... You beat me to it Piwin, this is a pet gripe of mine, or any other foreigner here that has to at some point or other write down a simple telephone number. That system is so slow! You have to wait many syllables and perform some arithmetic before you know even roughly what the number is going to be, quatrevingt quinze, like hey just run that past me again s'il tu plait! The research in the book you cite is quite well known - amongst psychology graduates from Wales at least - from what I remember there are fewer syllables in the basic numbers in Welsh than in English, giving rise to more than a little Welsh pride in that their language made them naturally more adept at math than their English cousins. In his book l'aventure des nombres Gilles Godefroy gives a historical reason for the linguistic craziness that is soixante dix huit and quatre vingt dix neuf. It comes from France's Celtic heritage. The Gauls aparently counted with a base 20 system which later got replaced by today's base 10 system. This is also where eleven and twelve come from in English and German before we hit the teens in the modern number system.
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Date Mar. 5 2016 22:52:44
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Paul Magnussen
Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Escribano)
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quote:
Good to see you didn't use rationalize there I thought about it (although I was educated to use -ise), because • It's more phonetic and more etymologically correct (the ultimate source being the greek -izo, it says here). • It would bring my spelling into line with the OUP, CUP and Times, and also make it less strange to Americans. But, according to Fowler: “It must be noticed, however, that a small number of verbs, some of them in very frequent use, like advertise, devise, and surprise, do not get their -ize even remotely from the Greek -izo, and must be spelt with -s-. the diffiiculty of remembering which these -ise verbs are is in fact the only reason for making -ise universal, and the sacrifice of significance to ease does not seem justified. The more important of these exceptions are here given: advertise, advise, apprise, chastise, circumcise, comprise, compromise, demise, despise, devise, disenfranchise, enfranchise, enterprise, excise, exercise, improvise, incise, premise, revise, supervise, surmise, surprise, televise.” I couldn’t be bothered to memorise all these. So in the end I said Sod it.
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Date Mar. 6 2016 1:29:45
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to El Kiko)
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quote:
Piwin ...its not so much that Basque got there .. it was already there ....all the original languages that were in the Iberian Peninsular were wiped out , by the long occupation of Rome for one thing .. hence Latin being there .. before all that lot turned up ..it was all different ...Basque seemed to have survived , but not in its original form ... Well, yes and no. The prevailing theory today is that Basque is a pre-Romance language which as you said survived the Roman occupation. However, even this doesn't suggest that Basque is native to the area, only that it got there before the Romance languages. Some have suggested Basque is related to Caucasian languages, others to Celtic lines. At one point, some thought it may be related to some subsaharan languages such as Peul (go figure...). The most widely accepted alternative is that Basque is a non Indo-European language (as opposed to all of the Romance languages) that must have developed in close contact to Indo-European, possibly millenia before the Roman invasion of Europe. This alternative theory tries to address one of the major questions that the main theory has left unanswered. If Basque was a non Indo-European and pre-Romance language, how come most of its lexicon is derived from Indo-European languages? (if I remember correctly, all of its verbs are Indo-European in origin...). I know much less about Japanese. The little I've read suggests that the state of affairs is fairly similar to that of Basque, with various theories positing a relationship to other languages, but with not enough confidence at this point to be able to say for sure. This part of linguistics is very similar to taxonomy. Scientists don't like these one-off exceptions (since they really don't make sense evolutionarily speaking) and will keep on trying to lump them into a known group until they find something satisfactory. quote:
I see from the first page the spread of votes , however I would not put much trust in it ,,there are only 26 votes in total ...and 30 % speak 4 languages .. it makes you wonder at what level some people can say ''speak'' I'm sure I don't know what you mean. I speak 15 languages and my picado reaches 14780 bpm easy. I'm one of those who put 4 languages, but it is true that they are not all at the same level of fluency. I cut out the languages where I can do nothing more than order a cab or have a basic conversation about concrete things. Of the languages I acquired as an adult, my Spanish is much more fluent than my German. Mainly because I live in Spain. When I lived in Germany, the opposite was true. Fluency is a b*tch and comes and goes depending on exposure to the language. Though I still don't have any trouble understanding colloquial German, it is true that I now make much more mistakes speaking than I used to (and my accent has gone down the drain...). Even with my other two languages, both of which are my mother tongues, I'm still much more fluent in one than the other (French).
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Date Mar. 6 2016 10:49:01
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El Kiko
Posts: 2697
Joined: Jun. 7 2010
From: The South Ireland
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Piwin)
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I get what your saying about Basque ok .. it just depends on how far back you wan to go ... your going further back than i was ... Considering most languages evolve rather than just burst into existence , it may just gradually become what we now know as Japanese or Basque etc ... like where did English come from ? ... how far back do you want to go ? and how many influences do you need to put in ?... although its not a Latin language there are over 500 cognates , i've heard , these would have been put there by the french and to some extent the Romans , that were more a force of occupation , never wiping the languages out ,but adding to it and thus transforming. I would be a 3 , Portuguese , Spanish , and English (and Rubbish) although for me Portuguese and Spanish seem to roll into 1 , its like cheating ...especially when you go to Galicia ... I often interchange bits of the languages for ease of use when speaking in the house with my wife ..(although she has French as well) sometimes it just seems more direct to say a point in different language ,,
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Date Mar. 6 2016 12:13:17
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to El Kiko)
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quote:
like where did English come from ? ... how far back do you want to go ? and how many influences do you need to put in ?... although its not a Latin language there are over 500 cognates , i've heard , these would have been put there by the french and to some extent the Romans , that were more a force of occupation , never wiping the languages out ,but adding to it and thus transforming. An interesting tidbit is that after the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066 (Hastings 'n all that jazz), the ruling elite spoke French whereas the lower strata of society spoke English. As a result, you now have many doublets and the word of French origin is usually of higher-register than the word of English/Germanic origin. For instance, commence/start, encounter/meet. Another example often mentioned is the names given to animals and their corresponding meat. The names of the animals that were reared by the English peasants are of Germanic descent (ox, sheep, pig) but the names of the corresponding meat eaten by the Norman ruling elite are of French descent (beef, mutton, pork). Count me in for speaking Rubbish too. I'm pretty fluent at it! I practice by speaking a bit of it every day...
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Date Mar. 6 2016 12:32:20
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