Languages

A small nation has to yield. Its not like we Finns can prance round the world automatically expecting everyone to master our language It is honestly very much a "blessing". Basically all of us speak English and Swedish but many also German, French, Spanish, Italian or Russian.Me - Ive only managed to learn more or less English, Swedish and German.

dwise1 writes: There are those who say that ultimately all Philosophy at the bottom is actually Linguistics. Even in people who speak the same language we always seem to be harping on & dissecting definitions of terms (see the Peanut Gallery bluegenes thread for example - NO - don't do that!) in discussing the Philosophy of Science.I had read a long time ago about a Navajo physicist, Fred Begay, who actually had an advantage in understanding sub-atomic physics because of his Navajo language. Here he is:Fred Begay | PhysicsCentralExcerpt: As a postscript, the U.S. decision in WWII to have Navajo be the base of encryption code was absolutely BRILLIANT.As a second postscript, Fred's description of his later return to visit the tribal reservations and trying to help his people of origin, from a Ph.D. level, talking & encouraging them to learn, was heart-breaking to read. I cannot imagine what he had to accept then and still has to accept now. Heart breaking.On the good front, Jacoby McCabe Ellsbury is carving out a very promising career as the first Navajo in Major League Baseball....dwise1 winds up saying: Exactly. The language you are brought up with can limit how you think!

I remembered this thread when I was browsing through the languages section of a book store. I was reading the introductions to various books in the "Colloquial" series (a really good series I think). For virtually every language the introduction went something like:"X is an exciting language to start learning, whether you live in X-land, have an interest in X-culture or X-literature, there has never been a better time to learn X....."For some of the harder languages it said:"X has a reputation as a hard language. However it also has (list of easy features) and the grammar is quite systematic"Then for Czech:"Czech is a very difficult language, no foolish promises will be made regarding your ability to learn it"It was literally the only text that wasn't "Yay, you can do it!".

I went to high school with a fellow who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1968. He used to carry around a huge dictionary called "English-Slovensk" or something like that. I presume he was from the Slovak side.We were in the same French class. We could communicate better in his bad English than in both of our bad French.

The only language I can speak & read reasonably well is English, but do have some capability in French, German & Korean.

Well, in what other language can you say whole sentences without bothering with any vowels?Although, I will admit that, whilst Str prst skrz krk was one of the first sentences I learnt to say in Czech, I've never had cause to use it outside the context of 'hey - this sentence has no vowels!'

Hi, Caffeine. Check out the Salishan language family. I'm pretty sure that, not only do they have some entire sentences without vowels, but also some entire sentences without any consonants that Indo-European speakers would recognize.

caffeine writes: Isn't the 4th letter of "Str prst skrz krk" a vowel????

Technically itsStrč prst skrz krkthe 'č' seems to have turned into ''Finding that out lead me to another Czech sentence:

quote:

---

Plch pln skvrn prch skrz drn prv zhlt čtvrt hrst zrn

---

Which is about a dormouse full of stains.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.