Languages, Dialects, Accents

by LoveUniHateExams 180 Replies latest jw friends

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  LoveUniHateExams

  Here's what I think the text mean in Modern English ...

  England's name comes from the Angles, one of three Germanic tribes who travelled to England, the other two tribes who came to England are the Saxons and Jutes. These settled in what is now England in the 5th and 6th centuries. Since 1707, when Great Britain was created, England is now a civilized nation.

  I'm not sure about my use of the word 'civilzed' ... 'ungeƿilde' = 'unwild'?, unwild means civilzed?

  Or could it mean 'unwanted'?

  Don't know for sure ...

  
  
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  knowsnothing1

  LUHE, I only speak English and Spanish fluently.

  I can communicate and understand basic Romanian. I haven't spoken in a bit, so I'm starting to lose it. I can read Portuguese much better, and speak it to some degree better as well, but still not fluent.

  I tried learning Russian for a bit, but it's difficult. At least I can read the Cyrillic alphabet, and I've studied a bit of Koine Greek as well. I'm a jack of all trades, but a master of none.
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  knowsnothing1

  LUHE, Arabic sounds like a difficult language to learn, especially the writing and pronounciation. However, I think it's cool that most words are based on 3 letter roots. So they've got that going for them.

  Why did you choose to learn Arabic? Just curious. I think it's a cool language for sure. Really, I think all languages are great. They all have a unique way of describing and looking at the world.
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  LoveUniHateExams

  Arabic sounds like a difficult language to learn, especially the writing and pronounciation - the writing is actually pretty easy. I can write Arabic script no problem.

  It's easier to write Arabic words in the Arabic script.

  Jameel, jamil and gameel all mean 'beautiful' but its spelling never varies in Arabic script: جميل.

  The hard part is the pronunciation. The Arabic alphabet is an abjad, which means it's a collection of consonants (only one letter, alif, is a vowel). The other 27 letters are consonants. This means that there are consonants that are not only foreign to English speakers but also very difficult to pronounce.

  Here's just one example ...

  Tisbah 3a kher is a way of telling someone good night. The first 'h' is a 'hissing h', like the sound you make when you're breathing on your glasses in order to clean them. This must be pronounced wherever it occurs in a word, including at the end of a word.Then the 3 is a consonant called 'ayin - this sound doesn't occur in English and is difficult to learn. You have to tense up the back of your throat to say it. Lastly, this is followed by 'kh' (similar to Scottish loch). Try pronouncing the whole phrase correctly, at normal speed XD

  I think it's cool that most words are based on 3 letter roots - yes, this is pretty cool.

  The three letters with a short 'a' sound after each letter (sometimes a short 'i' after the second letter) gives you the simplest form of the verb, the he form of the past tense. So

  T - B - KH mean something to do with cooking.

  Tabakha means 'he cooked' ... Arabic has no infinitive form so this form is also used to mean 'to cook'. The ma- prefix means place, so matbakh means kitchen, i.e. place where cooking occurs.

  D - R - S mean something to do with studying.

  Darasa means 'he studied', 'to study'. Madrasa means school, i.e. a place where studying happens. The mu- prefix means 'one who ...', so mudarris means 'one who makes others study', i.e. teacher (the double r is important here - mudaris just means one who studies, I think).

  Khabaza means to bake, he baked. Khubz is bread, makhbaz is bakery.

  Why did you choose to learn Arabic? - For two reasons, I suppose.

  First, because it's so different from English. It's different in every conceivable way - grammar, vocabulary, sound system, word order, alphabet.

  I remember seeing some Arabic writing a long time ago and thinking 'what the hell is that scribble?' XD

  Second, because initially the only Arabic words I knew was what I picked up from newspaper articles on Islamic terrorists - 'Allahu akbar!' ... 'mujahideen' ... 'al-khilafa' and so forth. I thought it'd be pretty sad if the only words of a language I knew were picked up from terrorists.

  Imagine being in the 1980s, not knowing a word of Irish Gaelic except 'Sinn Fein' ...
  
  
  
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  LoveUniHateExams

  Here's a thing ... I watched an interesting youtube vid recently about the promotion of the Manx language.

  There is one Manx-only primary school - bunscoil - on the island. An Irishman visited the school. What I found really interesting was that the visitor spoke Irish and the teacher spoke Manx and they could understand each other - no English was spoken in that conversation.

  The native names for the following languages are ...

  Irish - Gaeilge

  Manx - Gaelg

  Scots Gaelic - Gaidhlig

  It's clear that in all three languages, native speakers call their language Gaelic. So, I don't call Irish, 'Irish' ... neither do I call Manx, 'Manx'. I simply refer to each of them as 'Gaelic'. If I need to differentiate, I'd refer to Irish Gaelic, Manx Gaelic and so on. This might annoy nationalists but it's clear that the Gaels were/are an ethnolinguistic group. All three languages evolved from an older form of Irish.

  I was in the library looking to borrow the learn Arabic book/cd set again but they only had the book because someone had damaged the cd. So I borrowed a learn Scots Gaelic book/cd set instead. The language is absolutely fascinating, particularly the orthography and pronunciation.

  Fascinated by the youtube vid of Irish and Manx speakers understanding each other, I quickly looked at a vid that taught some basics of Irish and found that I understood most of it because of the few Scots Gaelic phrases I know.

  So, are the three forms of speech languages or dialects of one language?

  It might not be popular but a strong case could be made for arguing the latter.

  It's because of politics that they're considered three separate languages, i.e. they're spoken in three different countries.

  The situation with Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is similar - Danes, Swedes and Norwegians usually understand each other without too much difficulty. Should Danish, Swedish and Norwegian (Bokmal) be considered varieties of one language, continental Scandinavian? Makes sense to me.

  We have an opposite situation in countries like Germany and Italy. There, dialects differ from the standard as much as Norwegian does from Danish, but they're all called German or Italian because they're under one country.

  And there are tremendous differences between Arab dialects and the standard, but they're all considered Arabic because of the shared culture.

  The differences are probably greater than the differences in different types of Gaelic or Scandinavian, e.g. for 'I want' ...

  Modern Standard Arabic - ureed

  Palestinian dialect - biddi

  Gulf dialect - abgha

  ... WTF?! XD

  What do you think about these issues?

  Also, have you experienced being able to understand a speaker of a related language (e.g. Spanish-Portuguese, similar to the Irish-Manx example)?

  And one more thing, to anyone who speaks or knows Irish Gaelic: if I say "tha i gle fhuar an-diugh", what am I saying?
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  knowsnothing1

  Hey Luhe, as a dabbler in linguistics, I've thought about the issues you brought up. Yeah, politicizing languages is a thing, unfortunately.

  I used to think Chinese was a language, until I found out about Mandarin and Cantonese and the many different mutually unintelligible languages within China all considered Chinese! The only unifying thing they have is the written language.

  As a Spanish speaker, I can speak to a Portuguese speaker in Spanish, and they back in Portuguese and we understand each other. That really depends though. Slang is an entire subject on its own. I don't understand their slang at all. Every Spanish speaking country has their own slang as well. I had to learn how to speak Cuban slang in order to really understand my Cuban friends.

  As an example, English slang:

  What's hanging? What's up, dude?

  Cuban slang:

  ¿Que bolá acere?

  Literally means "What are you up to, group of smelly monkeys?" It only refers to a single person though.
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  LoveUniHateExams

  I used to think Chinese was a language, ... - yeah, from what I've read about it, there are something like 6 or 7 Chinese languages. As you pointed out, they are unintelligible but share a writing system. From what I remember, the word for Chinese people (in all the languages, I think) is Han.

  As a Spanish speaker, I can speak to a Portuguese speaker in Spanish, and they back in Portuguese and we understand each other. That really depends though. Slang is an entire subject on its own - I guess you would both have to iron out the wrinkles in your speech, as it were - avoid slang and use 'neutral' expressions that are more readily understood.

  BTW what's up, dude? is obviously American English but non-American English speakers know it well, from Hollywood, tv programs, etc.
  
  
  
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  LoveUniHateExams

  Here's something else I find interesting: orthography.

  Orthography is a language's spelling system; how different sounds are represented on the page.

  The Arabic script is very different to what we English speakers are used to but the system is regular and makes sense. Once you've got it, you've got it.

  German, too, is very regular. One instance of spelling irregularity is the word von. It has a short vowel so should really be spelled vonn. (Like English, the German spelling system signifies a short vowel by doubling the following consonant or using -ck. English also has the latter, e.g. back-baker.)

  But, in the main, German is thankfully regular:

  den (acc. masc. 'the' - long vowel)

  denn ('than' or 'for' - short vowel)

  And now for the nightmare that is English! XD

  I'm a pretty good speller and English is my native language so English orthography is natural to me ... but to people learning English as a second language, particularly adults, you have my sympathies. XD

  Christ, where to start?!

  Although the grammar is Germanic, English is a mixture of words from different languages and different scribes used different spelling systems over the centuries. For instance, the original English people wrote the Old English word for 'you' like this: þu. The vowel sound was long, like 'oo'. After 1066, Norman-French scribes left their mark on the language. The first letter of þu was called 'thorn', something the Norman scribes didn't have in their language. So, they got rid of it and used th to replace it. They did have a way of writing the oo sound - ou (cf. French vous). So that's most likely how þu became thou. It was still pronounced 'thoo' and not 'thow' - the vowel shift happened quite a bit later.

  And we don't even use thou today! We use you. Old English had two words for you - þu and ge. Modern you comes from iow which was the accusative version of ge.

  ^^^ all that for just one word! XD

  I mentioned something called the vowel shift. You see, English pronunciation has changed from the 14th century onward but our spelling hasn't. So we have lots of supposed silent letters, like gh in night. In the Middle English period gh would have been pronounced, probably as a fricative. But now it combines with the vowel to give a diphthong (two vowel sounds elided together, one after the other).

  Then there's ough in words such as enough, through, drought, though, bought, etc. XD
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  LoveUniHateExams

  So, my laptop has for some strange reason shut down. It literally won't start up. And, me being quite poor, I can't afford to have it fixed for the time being. Bugger!

  This is a real pain in the ass because my laptop is the only way I can listen to recorders of speakers of foreign languages.

  Listening is very important to me - I couldn't learn what little I know of Arabic without listening to native speakers. I'll hopefully continue to study Arabic in future, when I can afford to get my laptop mended and when I can afford to buy a colloquial Arabic thingy.

  Any type of language learning is out ... unless ... I suppose I could learn some Latin, to keep my mind occupied.

  Latin is a dead language, so no need to listen to speakers.

  So that's what I've done, I've borrowed a Teach Yourself Beginner's Latin from the library. I've only studied the first two or three chapters but it's actually fairly easy - lots of grammar but it makes sense.

  The vocabulary has been ok to learn because I speak English and remember some French from school; Latin's case system is ok because I did German which has a similar case system. German uses the preposition in with different cases to convey different meanings, and so does Latin, in a similar way. The issue is whether there is movement towards or not:

  Ich gehe ins Kino - 'I'm going to the cinema' (literally into the cinema), movement towards ... in + accusative.

  Ich sitze im Kino - 'I'm sitting in the cinema', no movement ... in + dative.

  Paulus in silvam ambulat - 'Paul walks into the wood', movement towards ... in + accusative.

  Paulus in silva ambulat - 'Paul walks in the wood', no movement towards, he stays in the wood, in + ablative.

  If you speak a Romance language such as Italian, you'll likely find Latin easy. Also, if you've studied another inflected European language such as Russian or Greek, you'll also no doubt find Latin a piece of p1ss.
  
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  nonjwspouse

  "LOL!

  Y'all should come to A-L-A-B-A-M-A.

  Sylvia"

  ha! Yes, like go to "A"- rab Ala.,or laFAYette GA. This list goes on and on. I chuckle so much when I hear these pronunciations. WHITwell is WHUH'wul.

  loveuni, I made sure my kids studied Latin in school. it is universal and so handy to have as a base to learn other languages. Then home programs for other languages.

  My middle daughter learned to speak creole when she is 15 before traveling to Haiti for a Mission trip for a week. Now that is one odd language.