What are the main characteristics of your language?

[Simon Darkshade]

Complexity, difficulty, universality, greatness, history and triumph.

 

[tehfreak]

œ and æ ?? Heh I know computers used to stick o's with e's, never knew why...
Like Cœur instead of coeur

 

[thestonesfan]

It's the only language for rock and roll.

 

[Dr Jimbo]

Irish is quite unusual in having a Verb-Subject-Object sentence structure. There's a whole bunch of other crazy stuff too, but it's years since I've had any education in it...

 

[Lord_Sidious]

there is a 'irish' language?

 

[Kyborgi]

funny thing from english lesson a couple of years ago. This might be funnier to non native english speakers who might have been in similar situations.
Teacher: What is the word for finnish citizen?
Pupil: Finn.
Teacher: And swedish?
Pupil: Swede.
... (this went on for a while)
Teacher: What about germany?
Pupil: Germ.

 

[CruddyLeper]

Irrationality, redundancy, verbosity and irrelavancy.

Amazing how many people stick with it.

 

[cgannon64]

there is a 'irish' language?

Yes, but no one really speaks it any more.

 

[Dr Jimbo]

there is a 'irish' language?

There's about 20,000 native speakers left, in isolated pockets on the western seaboard. However, everyone has to learn Irish for their entire school career, there's an Irish TV and radio station, all road signs and official documents have an Irish version, and they are talking of seeking to make Irish an official EU language, which would require all EU documentation to be translated into Irish. Which would probably keep the 20,000 actual Irish speakers employed indefinitely.
Don't get me wrong, Irish is a lovely language and there's some great poetry and prose literature written in it, but our government's attempts to 'save' it have been a horrendously ill-directed waste of money.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

Romanian is phonetic and to further that purpose it has 4 extra vowels. But as easy the written language is, as difficult the grammar may be. Like German, Romanian has gender for nouns and adjectives, only a few general ideas on how the plural is formed.

More for whomever is interested

 

[Sims2789]

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

Because they buy keybords made by American companies and it would be expensive to retool your factory to a Portuguese keyboard or take those three keys off of keyboards being shipped to Porugal or Brazil.

 

[cgannon64]

How do you go without a W? Isn't that kind of an essiential letter?

 

[Dr Jimbo]

Ve have Vays of getting by without a 'VV'

 

[Sims2789]

English has three pointless letters: K, Q and X. I would say C instead of K but then we would have to spell clan as klan, which would not make some people very happy. Plus we also have soft C's, which sound like S's, and the whole -tion, which is either shin or shun, depending on who is speaking it. We also have an array of French words which we usually mispronounce, like hors d'oeuvre. Th stands for two sounds, for example, this and hath. Plus we have around a ton of vowel sounds but only six vowels, one of which is sometimes a constonant and makes no unique noise. Plus S's often sound like Z's. There's many other stupid rules.

English Vowel Sounds:

ate, eight, operation,

at, apple,

operation, opera, cough, *

exclametion, enter,

eat, countries, cheese,

wide, wine, psychic,

ignition, engine

oyster, koi, boy,

boot, shoot,

boat, mope, gloat,

under, but

foot,

*Note that I put this cound, which is usually denoted by the use of O's, in the A section as it sounds more like the other A sounds than it does like the O sounds.

 

[Dr Jimbo]

All the funny spellings in English actually help you to remember the etymology of the words (even if unconsciously) and help to clarify their pronunciation and meaning. Changes that are proposed to 'simplify' the language tend to also lead to ambiguity.
All explained much better by Stephen Pinker in one of his books - try The Language Instinct

 

[Aphex_Twin]

How do you go without a W? Isn't that kind of an essiential letter?

There is no "w" sound in Romanian. It's not even clear wethter is should be pronounced "veh" or "oo".

 

[Aphex_Twin]

It's the only language for rock and roll.

Don't be so sure. You haven't heard it in Chinese of French .

 

[Sims2789]

How do you go without a W? Isn't that kind of an essiential letter?

In Spanish, there is no W except in foreign words. The get the W sound by combining either ue or ua, each respectively sounding like we (the e sounds like the a in the English word ate) and wa (the a sounds like it does in the English word at).

 

[Sims2789]

All the funny spellings in English actually help you to remember the etymology of the words (even if unconsciously) and help to clarify their pronunciation and meaning. Changes that are proposed to 'simplify' the language tend to also lead to ambiguity.
All explained much better by Stephen Pinker in one of his books - try The Language Instinct

That is true, and is why I know longer support changing English so that it makes sense.

 

[Yoda Power]

This is the Danish alphabet: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V X Y Z Æ Ø Å.

No W and we have the æ,ø,å combination.