Which language do you like most/is the most fascinating?

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Your response gives a whole new meaning to the word rigid.
Here is your answer librarian. Dutch!

Actually, English is the softening of "Anglish", or the language of the Angles, which was Germanic. The Angles were believed to originally come from that part of Germany just south of the Jutland peninsula (what is now Denmark). From Wiki:

"The Angles (Latin Anglii) were one of the main Germanic peoples who settled in Britain in the post-Roman period. They founded several of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, and their name is the root of the name England. The name comes from the district of Angeln, an area located on the Baltic shore of what is now Schleswig-Holstein in Germany."

It is true that many words were introduced to English through Viking depredations of a thousand to thirteen hundred years ago. But the core of the English language is Germanic.

Dutch? Please see the link below:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_word ... h_language

Again, are you going to have the character to admit you are wrong? If not, please don't waste my time.

Actually, English is the softening of "Anglish", or the language of the Angles, which was Germanic.

But I tend to agree with this. Says there, the Angle tribe was Danish. It comes from Jutland , Danmark. Definitely Viking. The Jutes were a Viking tribe and Vikings were all over the place and even traded deep into Russia, So, of course, you could say Germanic as the Jutes went long down into Germany.
In Swedish, 'eng' does indeed mean 'field' so, some Swede was probably filling their ego when they told me this.

http://www.englandandenglishhistory.com ... nglishness

Also, "Germanic has very broad meanings and one can see the countries this word encompasses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples

Last edited by tourettebassist on 26 Nov 2013, 1:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Can you type a few lines in Finnish please?

Question: I know that Finnish is very different from other European languages, as they migrated up from around Turkey. But aren't other Scandinavian languages very different from German as well?

Germanic is difficult to define the same as Celt is. Voltaire quipped that Germany was an army in search of a country, and there was a lot of truth in this, at least until after WWII. I think the best definition is linguistic.

Pokerface - this is the question you asked in Finnish (thanx Babylon translator):

Voitteko te kirjoittaa muutaman rivin suomeksi olkaa hyvä?

Finns are not associated with Turkey but are believed to be from forest tribes near the Urals. The language is heavily influenced by the native 'Sami' (lapplanders)

When you see double (or triple) vowels it is pronounced longer( and longer). I find Finnish a very un-melodic language, having worked with Finns a lot in Sweden (I know a lot of Finnish cuss words)

Librarian: I have no problem understanding a large amount of German thru my knowledge of Swedish. Can't speak it tho. These were all Baltic states and traded extensively. Trade- That's one reason Dutch has a ring of English to it. You say Germanic is more linguistic - there ya go ! ! Scandinavian languages fall into the 'Germanic ' arena as does our English. I think a German speaking person tho would have a harder time understanding the Scandinavian languages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages

Pokerface - this is the question you asked in Finnish (thanx Babylon translator):

Voitteko te kirjoittaa muutaman rivin suomeksi olkaa hyvä?

Finns are not associated with Turkey but are believed to be from forest tribes near the Urals. They have no physical characteristics of Mediterranean people. The language is heavily influenced by the native 'Sami' (lapplanders)

When you see double (or triple) vowels it is pronounced longer( and longer). I find Finnish a very un-melodic language, having worked with Finns a lot in Sweden (I know a lot of Finnish cuss words). Wiki states that 'old ' Finnish language dates to the stone age and DNA wise, of modern nationalities, Finns are closest to Cro-Magnons in terms of anthropological measurements (no offense to Finns, please). They are a pretty isolated group.

Librarian: I have no problem understanding a large amount of German thru my knowledge of Swedish. Can't speak it tho. These were all Baltic states and traded extensively. Trade- That's one reason Dutch has a ring of English to it. You say Germanic is more linguistic - there ya go ! ! Scandinavian languages fall into the 'Germanic ' arena as does our English. I think a German speaking person tho would have a harder time understanding the Scandinavian languages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages

I can follow that; I was learning Indonesian at home, at the same time I was following a Mandarin course (it's not as hard as it may seem!) with a teacher and classmates, and at times when I felt down or irritable, I had a lot of difficulties with keeping up my Mandarin practice and motivating myself to do the homework. But with Indonesian I didn't have this, because I was doing it from a more spontaneous motivation. So my Indonesian improved a lot faster than my Chinese.

It's cool your studying Danish at university, are you following it as a supplementary course, or are ou specifically following Danish or Scandinavian languages and culture?


Yes, agreed. Even if you've learned all the basic kanji necessary for understanding every-day Japanese media, still hundreds if not thousand kanji remain for the more obscure and less frequently used words. So you'll keep learning new characters.

"So does this mean English really has the most words: not likely. Agglutinative languages such as Finnish most certainly have more words and more readily create new words to adapt to changing time by fusing existing words creating an almost infinite number of combination. Yet English remains dominant perhaps not in the number of words, but in the reach and power of the language."
http://bayblab.blogspot.de/2009/06/whic ... words.html

"Comparing one language to another can be like comparing trains to automobiles because of the differences in grammar and nuance. This growth in diversity has been transpiring since the Tower of Babel and raises many questions. Do we count ‘write,’ ‘wrote’ and ‘written’ as separate words, or the same word? And what of countries who compound words, such as ‘phrasebook?’ The Germans, for example, are prone to compose words to more effortlessly describe anything, such as ‘umweltverschmutzung ,‘ which is two words joined together to mean “the drying up of the world’s pollution.” Should we count such compounded words as new words? And what of homophones or words that are spelled the same but have different meanings? ‘Leaves’ means both “the plural of leaf” and “goes away.” Do we count them as one word or two? In this case alone the examples are endless, making the job of counting words seemingly unattainable."
http://languages.com/2013/02/06/the-lan ... ost-words/

Last edited by Raziel on 26 Nov 2013, 4:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm studying international Literature and Scandavian.

Read what you sent very carefully. Due to its unique structure, Finnish has the potential for an infinite number of words, which is not realized in actuality. Again, over eighty percent of the research in the world is published in English (with the majority of the remainder being German and Japanese). As far as I know, the amount of serious research being published in Finnish, even in Finland, approaches zero. If Finnish really were the superior language for expressing sophisticated or subtle concepts, this would not be the case.

Another criticism is that many words which have been incorporated into English aren't English in their origins (e.g., algebra, patio, hominy, beautiful, color). To me this is a specious argument as English has adopted all these words, and many more.

Being the most influancial language is something different than being the language with the most words.
I've the feeling that every language tries to be special and one sentence I heared in all countries at least once:
In Germany: "German is the most difficult language"
In France: "French is the most difficult language"
In the US: "English is the most difficult language"


I'm so annoyed about the fact that some ppl want to define themself about speaking the most special/difficult or whatever language in the world...!

I just wanted to know the personal opinions of the ppl and that's very subjective, that's all.

Again, from the research I just did, it is a quirk of the Finnish language that it can create endless new words. The problem twofold: That in practice its vocabulary is no more substantial in practice than other minor European languages; and that its theoretically infinite vocabulary adds no real ability to enhance expression or communication.

Actually, I would consider being difficult to learn to be a liability. In fact, I admire Latin for its ease of use, logical structure, and accessibility. OTOH, the bewildering patchwork of foreign words introduced is part of what makes English so unique and versatile. I do not envy anybody trying to learn English as a foreign language. So, in that respect, I'm lucky I grew up with it.

Finally, let me say that while it's nice to be able to converse with so many people in my native language, I hope that English never supplants all of these other native tongues. Were I to visit Finland and only hear English spoken and written, I would feel cheated. Let the Finns be Finns, the Dutch be Dutch, and everybody else be who they are; it's part of what makes the world interesting. We will all be the lesser if everybody speaks the same language.

From the first link:

"The original claim that there are 1 million words [in English] comes from the university of Texas which has an algorithm caching and crawling social networking sites all along identifying any expression used over 25 000 times as a word. Of course many people have problems with this, since it is not an accepted definition of a word. It incorporates any deformation or misspelling of common words, commercial trademarks, onomatopoeia which would include for example: "what", "wat", "waht", "wh4t", "whaaaaat", "whassssssssssssup" etc ... Many people have critisized the methodology itself, since the "Global Language Monitor" claimed the millionth word in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009."
http://bayblab.blogspot.de/2009/06/whic ... words.html

Also I'm glad that my native language is a different one than English. This has to do with the fact that otherwise I maybe never would have really learned a foreign language, but with my first language being German I was forced to learn other languages to communicate. After the time I understood the value of being able to speak many different languages, because you also learn the culture and also because it keeps your brain active.
The first foreign language I came in touch with is Greek, I was never able to speak it, but could understand it to some degree. The second language was French and the third one was English. So English is not the first forreign language I learned actually. And if I would have children, I would propably first teach them French, because we are living close to the border and also they'll learn English anyway. The problem with English is, being able to speak it, even in countries with another Native language, ppl just talk to you in English when they realize you are a foreigner what makes it difficult to learn the Native language of that place.
I would wish to have a global language for comunication purposues like Esperanto for example who is easy and also so everyone is in the need to learn at least one forreign language.

What I find most fascinating are words that exist in one language, but not in the other. In English there is no real word for the German word: "Heimat". You could translate it with "home", but it actually describes the area you are/or feel at home. So it has a more abstract meaning. Also in German we don't have the word "to put", so we use words like: "stellen, legen, setzen" (to set, to lay, to sit something) to describe it. There are many many words like this, so you can't translate a language fully.

Last edited by Raziel on 27 Nov 2013, 12:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.