Random sentences in foreign languages

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哲学はあなたが想像するほど難しい学科ではない。
Tetsugaku ha anata ga souzou suru hodo muzukashii gakka de ha nai.

"Ma doué béniguett' ! !"

Et je ne ferai aucune rime même si elle peut être riche.

Mikhâim berim nahar bukhorim, mikhâid bâ mâ biâid? (Farsi, "We're going to go have lunch, would you like to come with us?"...hopefully I got the unipars right...)

Hvor er Mikkel Bryggers gaden? (Danish, "Where is Michael Brewer's street')

Okta, guokta, golbma, njaellja, vihtta, guhtta, gieža, gávcci, ovcci... (Davvisámmi, or Northern Sami, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...")

I would like to learn some Farsi. But my language plate is quite full. I barely have enough time for the language I already am learning!



Chan eil mi air faicinn Saimi a Tuath a-riamh. Coltach ri a' Ghàidhlig, tha i na mion-chànan, agus tha mi toilichte daonnan a bhith a' faicinn--'s a' cluintinn--mion-chànanan! (I haven't seen Northern Sami before. Like Gaelic, Sami is a minority language and I'm always happy to see--and hear--minority languages!)

'S urrainn dhomh cunntadh ann naoi cànanan: a' Bheurla, a' Ghàidhlig, Gearmailtis, Frangais, Spainntis, Ruisis, beurla na h-Innd Innse, Iapanais, 's Arabais (I can count in 9 languages: English, Gaelic, German, French. Spanish, Russian, bahasa Indonesia, Japan and Arabic)

Finno-Ugrian languages here?

Olvasgattam visszatekintve, hogy a magyarokat nem szabad összetéveszteni a cigányokkal (pardon, romákkal), hogy Budapesten kívül még jó az országban az a vicc, hogy "Magyar tojásrántotta receptje: lopj két tojást...", és hogy kicsiny országunk igen-igen összement Trianon után, de főleg azért, mert Nagy Lajos korában három tenger mosta partjait... (A cionizmussal kapcsolatos ranting nem érdemelne említést sem).

So, what language is this?

(hint: look left!)

Hongrois !

Bonjour,

Aujourd'hui, une expression idiomatique française : "Le mariage de la carpe et du lapin ".

Une fois que vous aurez traduit les mots, vous n'aurez aucune peine à deviner de quoi ça parle ni dans quelles conditions l'utiliser, au sens large et figuré.

Sinon, une question que je me pose, une parmi d'autres et à l'internationale : est-ce-que la maya, indienne, et la berlue, française, sont des synonymes ou à peu près ?

Persian is cool, but its verbs are horrible. If I recall correctly, the stem for just about every single verb is irregular, and I'm very bad with irregularities.

Northern Saami is awesome. I have The Little Prince in it. Although I'd learn Norwegian and Finnish before that, but maybe someday.

Jeg maa laerer meg norsk! (I don't have my Faeroese/Norwegian diacritics on my laptop )

Norvegiera ikasten behar dut!

Bonjour!

You guessed right. =) I'm afraid I'm losing the essence if I translate by the Fish at Babel (not possessing French). Once you have translated the words, you'll have to suffer with guessing what that means and under what conditions should it be used, in the broad sense and figuratively.

"Recently I have been reading (posts) in retrospect, that Hungarians should not be mistaken for Gypsies (pardon, Romas), and apart from Budapest this joke is also good regarding Hungary: "The recipe of Hungarian scrambled-eggs: steal two eggs...", and our sweet little country has shrunk rather so much after Trianon, but mainly because its coasts had been washed by three seas at the era of Louis the Great... (the ranting about zionism wouldn't deserve mentioning)."

Il silenzio è d'oro, la parola d'argento.

Silence is golden, word is silver.


And from Norway

Selg ikke skinnet før bjørnen er skutt

Non vendere la pelle prima di aver sparato all'orso

Don't sell the bear skin before you have caught the bear

Nesthekahura viya usure'na bier. Iuole kahura kito'hoe
Literally: Absense of life way'na(na is prefix marking destination) is. Together life [we] always will have.
Translation: Death is the road to awe. Together we will live forever.

This is Tusa Skernii, which is a conlang I've been working on for about a month. It's an analytic language arranged in SOV order. I created it for a race of sentient reptiles in a book I've been writing for 3 years called The Celestial Gardeners. It is a Lingua Franca among these people.

If I recall correctly Finnish has fifteen noun cases that are used regularly (plus four that are basically either archaisms or found only in text) whereas Northern Sami has six; good luck! (naturally I'm just giving you a bit of a hard time; I'd love to learn Finnish if I had the time to invest in it >_<)

Well I'm learning Basque and it has many cases too. Cases are no more difficult than prepositions (the locative cases of course. I'm very well versed with nominative/ergative, accusative/absolutive, dative, and genitive already), it's just irregular word forms that I'm bad with. In Finnish, the noun (and to some extent verbs too I believe) stems undergo regular changes based on their use, although there are many rules to learn. But that's no big deal for me. What I can't handle is over 10 different ways of forming the plural, arbitrary grammatical genders with little chance at guessing it correctly (German and French, unlike Spanish and Italian where you can easily guess the gender in many cases), and other things like that. I thrive on order and regularity.

I will admit that the gender in German appears, from a modern perspective, to be quite arbitrary but it's a little clearer if you examine languages like Althochdeutsch (Old High German) and Gothic (Wright's Grammar of the Gothic language is a great book on the subject and is quite possibly one of the best finds I have ever made in the local used book shop).

Correct. The way gender has evolved in German seems arbitrary to a learner, and perhaps even to some native speakers, but it's not exactly. Modern spelling changes and the introduction of contemporary words and loanwords from other languages have made some of the patterns less obvious, but there are definitely patterns. I used to have a book that went into this more, but I've long lost that book. When I was younger, and German was the only language I knew beyond beginner level, I could intuit gender much better than I do now (reading a lot of older German helps too and I was reading German philosophers for grad school).

French too isn't as arbitrary as people might think. It's just the rules of gender have gotten a bit complex, and so you don't usually learn the rules until you a bit advanced. Most beginner and intermediate students are usually just told to memorize gender.

Ah, quelquefois et d'une certaine façon, peut-être. Mais il ya des différences importantes éventuellement, non? Je pense que cela dépend de comment une personne pense dans sa langue maternelle. Par exemple, les Gaéls anciens ne pense pas du temps de la même manière que de nombreux autres Européens. Donc les nuances en gaélique moderne pour le temps peut être très difficile de faire comprendre pour les gens qui apprennent le gaélique.