The phasing out of languages around the world

Obviously, a joke. I studied French for five years. The pronounciation was probably the most difficult thing to get down, as the grammar is fairly easy.

 

I failed Spanish, French, Latin and Russian in my storied educational career. Burn 'em all.

 

In English, though, you don't have to decline nouns or conjugate verbs (except for the -s on third person singular) or worry about gender of things. And sentence structure (subject-verb-object) is straightforward. You don't have to toss the verb to the end of the dependent clause like you do in German.

It's things like knowing how to pronounce words like through, rough, cough and though that trip up furriners. And when to use then/than and to/two/too. We're experts at that and don't see how hard it is.

 

On a slightly related note, I saw a story last week that ICANN, the international Internet overlords, have said that they're going to permit Internet addresses in character sets other than the Latin/Roman alphabet.

 

I'll take homonyms and idioms over that gender crap that goes on in French.
How can a tomato be male or female?

 

I'm not sure of the actual numbers, but I thought there were more words in English that are Germanic in orgin than there are words that are from Latin or Greek. Linguists consider English to be a Germanic language.

Football_Bat is right about the tricky pronunciations. I think those are also the toughest things for young kids learning to read and write. I know that is what trips my daughter up the most.

 

I plan on taking some lessons from a native speaker. He said the only way to get it down is to do it on a constant basis. I was involved in French group that met twice a month, but time constraints meant I haven't been able to attend a meeting in a while.

The hardest thing for me is that the modifier goes after the nouns it describes. Conjugating verbs isn't as hard as I once thought once I picked up Essential French Grammar, little book with loads of tips.

 

God?

 

That's pretty fucking deep man.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Word_origins
The answer is somewhere in between. Almost all of the most common words we use are "Germanic" or originated in Old English. Through the whole language though, it's about evenly split between French, Latin and Germanic. A lot of the French words came into the language as synonyms (i.e. beef = boeuf).

 

My wife cannot tell the difference between the English words "slip" and "sleep" when she hears them spoken.

On the other hand, her language has one letter for "sh" (Ш) and another for "shch" (Щ) which, I swear, sound 99.98% the same.

"No! They are totally different!" she insists.

 

My girlfriend laughs at me when I try to pronounce her last name & asks me not to try.

In English, it's transliterated as a consonant followed by three vowels. But it's all in how you say it.

I find stuff like this article fascinating & have enjoyed this thread a lot.