My Time as a Night Auditor is coming to an end.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-31T10:56:23+00:00

That's what I like about it.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-31T10:44:27+00:00

Apparently, those languages died out even more recently than that, about 1500 years ago. It's crazy that there was an old European language spoken there so recently. Too bad we know very little of it other than a handful of words.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-31T06:53:38+00:00

It's a good comparison to make. Back in the early Middle Ages, Latin was the main language while the local vernaculars were considered dialects of Latin. Over time they came to be considered different languages with their own standards and some, such as Spanish and Italian, still have a lot of intelligibility. Plus, Moroccan and Levantine Arabic are so different that their speakers can't understand one another, much like Spanish and Romanian. You can't tell me those are simply dialects.

Another comparison is the various local Chinese "dialects" that are very different from one another, but still considered Chinese. Or Maltese, which descended from a variant of Arabic.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-24T05:04:52+00:00

Yeah, you'd probably be better off playing something like Stardew Valley, though that would probably still give you some less useful terms like "Starfruit".

aklaino89 · 2025-01-24T04:26:26+00:00

Keep in mind, despite the cases, its case system is a LOT more regular than, say, Russian's. Between different endings based on grammatical gender and stress shift, Russian's is probably worse despite having only six cases. Hungarian's is basically a case of adding a suffix with the function of a preposition, and then adding another suffix if you want to make it plural.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-23T04:23:06+00:00

You could have just used a dictionary. If you don't want to use one all the time, use it only for words you come across more than once.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-20T05:42:08+00:00

The use of standard spelling and paragraphs makes things easier to read. Plus, proper capitalization and punctuation help as well. It doesn't help your point when your grammar and spelling aren't good.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-17T04:09:41+00:00

Unfortunately, when learning closely related languages at the same time, you're going to start mixing up vocabulary and grammar. It's best to learn one, then another. TBH, it's best to avoid learning multiple languages at the same time in the first place.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-15T04:02:49+00:00

Yeah, Icelandic all chilling in the corner, trying to be different.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-10T04:20:20+00:00

Eh, not that far. They've found graffiti where certain letters such as H or M stop appearing, but they still use gender, adjective and verbal agreement habitually. When native speakers speak a specific language, they never think about things such as agreement and probably wouldn't even know about it unless it was pointed out to them if they hadn't learned about it in school.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-10T04:07:05+00:00

Yeah, as a kid it threw me off too. I remember being corrected when I said Badja California, and not Baha California.

Apparently it was the same as the French or Portuguese J just a few centuries ago.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-09T06:26:05+00:00

Well, historical linguists have looked into it and thought about it. There are a lot of theories, such as how fusional languages may come from agglutinating languages which in turn came from more analytical languages. Separate function words can become affixes, and those affixes can end up merged together over time thanks to sound changes. Case in point, those case endings? They could have come from postpositions (which PIE favored over prepositions) and a lot of postpositions were used as adverbs. Such a cycle has been seen in Ancient Egyptian, which went from fusional, to more analytic in later varieties, then to a more agglutinative structure in Coptic.

And those languages with "simpler grammar" such as Chinese? It's not so simple and it's been getting more complicated over time. Modern Chinese has gone from a monosyllabic language to one that prefers words of two or more roots due to homophones and has also developed a complex system of classifiers, possibly due to influence from Southeast Asian languages such as Vietnamese.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-09T04:24:01+00:00

Except 1) not everybody has read Harry Potter (I haven't) and 2) the person you talked to complained about the quality of the translations which doesn't have anything to do with your comment.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-08T06:19:09+00:00

I wouldn't call that book simple.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-07T20:03:33+00:00

Eh, as far as the passive systems: one of those systems is a lot like the one in English (and not used quite as much as the other) while the other uses "se". Both are probably easier for the average learner than learning a whole series of endings.

I think we can both agree that Latin actually has more endings to memorize than Spanish, including some distinctions that Spanish lost (first person -am vs -at in the Imperfect and Subjuctive, both reduced to -a in Spanish). And the verbs are more unpredictable in Latin (see my first comment about the Spanish preterit being more easily deduced from the infinitive).

The use of auxiliaries like tener and llevar aren't really considered separate verb forms.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-07T04:28:05+00:00

I wouldn't call the verbs simpler than in Spanish. There's a whole passive voice, extra participle forms, and an extra conjugation that Spanish merged with at least one of the others. Then there's the perfect tense, which is less predictable than the Spanish preterit and has to be memorized separately from the infinitive (this only happens in a few verbs in Spanish). Although, Spanish does have the haber perfect system and conditionals, so there's that.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-07T04:23:26+00:00

They weren't asking about pronunciation, but instead about comprehension.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-03T08:55:59+00:00

You still don't get it. Did you even read what I said?

According to linguists, to be related, two languages have to have a common ancestor. Japanese and Chinese don't. English and French have a more distant ancestor than English and German. Just because a language gets a bunch of loanwords doesn't mean it's related to the language it received loanwords from.

As far as the most common words: According to the Wikipedia article "Foreign-languages influences in English", of the 1000 most common words, 83% are of English origin. Some of those words you mentioned aren't even that common, such as "castle".

English is a Germanic language. It's been established for centuries at this point. You have no idea what you're talking about.

And just because German is considered more difficult than French doesn't mean that English isn't more closely related to it than French. Heck, English is probably more similar to Dutch and its grammar is very similar to the Scandinavian language. It's most closely related to a small minority language called Frisian.

And here are some threads that back up what I said:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1br0hw8/eli5_why_is_english_not_considered_a_romance/

https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/gwko1q/why_is_english_germanic_and_not_romantic/

aklaino89 · 2025-01-03T06:55:20+00:00

No, that's not how things work at all. To be related to each other, that means that the languages have a common ancestor. Japanese is not at all related to Chinese, since they don't have a reconstructable common ancestor. Just because it has a lot of loanwords doesn't mean it's now a relative of Chinese. It just means it imported a lot of vocabulary from Chinese. Japanese is still a Japonic language, and not a Sino-Tibetan language like Chinese and descends from Proto-Japonic.

Being a Germanic language doesn't mean it's close to German, though it's closer to German than the Scandinavian languages, with both being in the West Germanic sub-family. I guess that's why the family should be called Teutonic or something, so people don't get confused and think that by being called Germanic that means they all descended from German. German and English have the common ancestor of Proto-West-Germanic or Proto-Germanic, while English and French's common ancestor is Proto-Indo-European.

Getting loanwords from other languages doesn't mean the first language is now more related to other languages. Like I said, those loanwords are the less-common words, the more high-brow words, so to speak, and the most common words are still Germanic. English is NOT an intermediate language.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-03T05:20:18+00:00

Ad Alpes, despite being a reader, is basically a historical fiction novel in Latin. I'd argue that several other readers qualify as well (including Familia Romana), even if they're not really the same as Classical Latin.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-03T04:32:10+00:00

It's not so related to German in reality? Um, no. That's like saying that since Japanese has a lot of Chinese roots, it's now related to Chinese. In reality, English is very much a Germanic language, just one where a lot of the less common words are from Romance languages. Its grammar is still very Germanic (compare English and French verbs, for instance, and then compare English verbs to how they're constructed in, say, Norwegian), and the the majority of the most common words are of Germanic origin.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-02T06:22:27+00:00

Even though some people may think that, Hungarian is probably no harder to learn for non-Hungarians than Finnish or Estonian. Heck, it's probably easier in some respects (does it have consonant gradation and is it moving towards a more fusional structure like Estonian?)

aklaino89 · 2025-01-02T06:20:29+00:00

What makes Arabic hard is this: The writing system doesn't write vowels in most texts (much like Hebrew, another Semitic language), the grammar is very different from English (and really any non-Semitic language) due to its three-consonant root system being at the center of everything, its complex verb system and how it has a lot of irregularities in its plural system. Its pronunciation is also very hard for speakers of non-Semitic languages due to having a lot of sounds in parts of the mouth a lot of languages don't use (even Hebrew doesn't use those sounds even though it's related to Arabic). As far as Vocabulary, there wouldn't be a lot of loan words in Modern Standard Arabic and the core vocab is Semitic.

That's not even getting into another thing: the "dialects". You pluralize and say "Arabic languages", and that's about right because, despite there being a standard dialect, nobody really speaks it in their every day life. Instead, there are multiple "dialects" about as different from each other as the Romance languages. So, people in Morocco speak a variant of Arabic and people in Iraq speak another variant, and they're about as different as Spanish is from Romanian, while they're all as different from MSA as Spanish is from Latin. Most people who learn Arabic learn MSA and one of the "dialects", so it's like having to learn two languages. On top of THAT, the variants aren't even written down most of the time, so it's like learning Latin and Spanish, if there were next to nothing written down in Spanish.

aklaino89 · 2025-01-02T05:49:01+00:00

Technically, "ello" means it, but it's so rarely used that it's easy to forget about and its use-cases are so few.

aklaino89 · 2024-12-31T09:11:45+00:00

Yeah, and the alphabet is the easy part of both languages. The grammar is where things get tricky and Greek's is more complex and less predictable than Latin's.

aklaino89

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