What are the main characteristics of your language?

[Lord_Sidious]

Every language has different characteristics.
Mine, Portuguese has a stange alphabet. It hasan't k,w and y. Here is the portuguese alphbet: ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVXZ. And has the ~ symbol used in ã,õ. it has the ç. And yours?

 

[Mise]

No K, W or Y, eh? How come your keyboards have them then?

 

[Lord_Sidious]

our keyboards have k w y

 

[Mise]

our keyboards have k w y

Duh....

I meant, why do they have them if you don't use them in your language?

I mean, we don't have Russian letters or Greek letters, so how come you guys have English letters? Is it just so you can type in English?

 

[Lord_Sidious]

we need k w y to write other languages

 

[Akka]

Plenty of accents, strange "letters" (ç, œ, æ), filled with more rules and exceptions than you could imagine, and an even more complex and weird conjugation.

But at least, with all this, it allows it to be an "historical" language. You can nearly trace its history through the layers of grammatical rules.

 

[Mise]

BTW, I always thought that Portuguese was very similar to Spanish, but people keep telling me it's completely different. They say that it's much harder for a Spanish speaker to learn Portuguese than, say, French. Is this true?

 

[Lord_Sidious]

portuguese has latin, arab, germanic, greek, spanish, french, english, asian languages, african languages and native brazilian languages influences (all because of the age of descovery) imagin all that languages combined in a soup

 

[Tomoyo]

A character system, as well as 9 different tones.

 

[lord_yoshi]

漢語 (Chinese)

Takes a long time to write on the computer, and is based on symbols.

 

[jack merchant]

From my admittedly limited experience, it isn't at all different - if you can read Spanish, you can read Portuguese too. The difference is mainly in pronunciation. The Spanish (or at least the Castillians) articulate every vowel, while Portuguese jumbles everything together, which makes understanding the spoken variant quite a bit harder.

 

[Lord_Sidious]

BTW, I always thought that Portuguese was very similar to Spanish, but people keep telling me it's completely different. They say that it's much harder for a Spanish speaker to learn Portuguese than, say, French. Is this true?

They say that its easy a Portuguese learn Spanish and difficult a Spanish learn Portuguese. By the way Portuguese in a very complex and difficult language. That's why a Portuguese can learn other languages easaly.

 

[crystal]

Main characteristics of Finnish (shamelessly stolen from http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/finnish2.html)

1) absence of gender (the same Finnish pronoun hän denotes both he and she),
2) absence of articles (a and the in English),
3) long words due to the structure of the language,
4) numerous grammatical cases,
5) personal possession expressed with suffixes,
6) postpositions in addition to prepositions, and
7) no equivalent of the verb to have.

And oh, the alphabets are a-z plus å, ä and ö (although å is only used in Swedish names; Finland is a bilingual country.)

 

[Stefan Haertel]

ä, ö, ü, ß

I can't find any English words that sound exactly like ä, ö or ü, but ß is pronounced like the standard English s. A German s would therefore sound like a standard English z, and a German z would sound like "ts".

Some other characteristics:

Three articles, der, die, das instead of just one like "the"; "der" is masculine, "die" is feminine and "the" is neutral. Note that "dass" is different. The relation between "das" and "dass" is similar to the two "that" in English; "That girl" would be "das Mädchen", while "that this" would be "dass dies".

Capitals are much different in German than in English. Nouns all begin with capitals, while, for example, English would have no capitals, i.e. be written "englisch", unless it refers to the language.

English "sh" is "sch" in German.

I'll think of more later, but I'm off to bed now.

 

[crystal]

@Stefan Haertel:

Don't forget that Germans put (nearly) all the verbs at the end of a sentence!

...and German also sounds great in war movies too.

 

[SeleucusNicator]

Don't get me started.

 

[WS78]

Have you ever heard Swedes talk? It's like they sing, all the time!

 

[Serutan]

If English were a dog, it would be a mongrel, and an ugly one at that. Start with
Saxon, mix in large helpings of Danish and French, spice with Greek and Latin, and
a dash of several other languages.

 

[Hundegesicht]

And Celtic, don't forget Celtic, though strangely it doesn't seem to have that much influence on our language, as opposed to Angle-Saxon, Jutish, Danish, the other Germanic/Norse languages, and French. Latin and Greek doesn't seem to be predominant until the Renaissance, though, despite the fact it was the "official" language of the island for 400 years.

 

[Perfection]

Well, interpretative dance is quite different from other languages, it uses music and symbolic gestures to get points across, sometimes they borrow phrasing from other languages, but most the communication is by movement, gestures, flow and musical accompaniment.