Civ'ed
I ain't gotta explain a thing
Nah, English is just Scots spelt weird.
What languages do you speak/are you learning?
- Thread starter Ashcristokos
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Borachio
Way past lunacy
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I believe this is true of all languages.
I do realize this is a radical point of view, though.
salty mud
Deity
Arabic is just English but written funny! 
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That's truer than you think. Traditional Scots spelling is basically Early Modern, but English spelling has undergone all sorts of bizarre mutations, modernisations and misguided-yet-enduring attempts to turn it into French.
At any rate, if Scots is English spelt wrong, then British Standard English is also English spelt wrong, and at least Scots has the virtue of being systematically incorrect.
sophie
Break My Heart
What does this even mean?
Before someone (presumably a Dutch nationalist) comes in to say that Duth is older than German.
Hardly. I can approximate it, not speak it, definitely not without being recognized after the first sentence, giving the Slovaks a case of serious giggles
So, passively I am just below native speaker level (being born in Czechoslovakia and hearing spoken Slovak daily on TV until the age of 8, as well as spending numerous holidays in Slovakia, probably qualifies), but actively I can produce only something that to me sounds like Slovak, but is in reality a mixture of the two languages.
Slovak is still closer to Czech than some Czech dialects. IMHO it should be under native.
sophie
Break My Heart
But which Dutch and which German?
It's not like in civ where you just "discover" "modern" German or "modern" Dutch. These languages exist on a constantly evolving continuum stretching all the way back to Denmark/Scania in the 12th or 13th century BC, and from there all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. What distinctions exist that delineate "Old High German" and "Modern German" or "Franconian" or "Old Dutch" and "Modern Dutch" is entirely arbitrary and applied post-facto.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I'd guess that "Dutch is older that German" means that print-Dutch is older that print-German which is... not entirely untrue? But so heavily qualified that it ends up meaning very little.
Especially given that it wasn't until the nineteenth century that people outside of the Netherlands started to agree that Dutch wasn't just a funny kind of German to begin with.
Especially given that it wasn't until the nineteenth century that people outside of the Netherlands started to agree that Dutch wasn't just a funny kind of German to begin with.
TheLastOne36
Deity
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Somehow I feel this is just how languages evolved in the first place. If we don't take into consideration modern transportation and accessibility, the information age, TV and the internet, etc., I wouldn't be surprised if Scottish English evolved into its own language after a century or two from now.
How different would Galician, Portuguese, Castillian, and Catalan, or the various Italian dialects be from each other/Medieval Latin circa 900AD?
salty mud
Deity
Well, yeah. But you wouldn't exactly call them "different languages" like some people do with Scots and English.
Winner
Diverse in Unity
I don't think so. Slovak is like a major dialect of Czech which has split and differentiated into another bunch of dialects. Somewhere along the Morava river you can see (hear) how the two languages gradually shift.
Some Moravian or (the now very minor) Bohemian dialects may be slightly weird if you hear them for the first time, but they're still closer to the "standard Czech" standard in grammar and lexicon than "standard Slovak".
But I wouldn't dispute that insofar as understanding is concerned, Czechs can easily be counted under native-level. It's the production which is a problem
Kurdish is really confusing because it uses the ergative. In the past tense, instead of saying for example - I ate the apple you would say it like - the apple my ate.
The direct object goes in the middle of the verb in the present tense which is also confusing at first. Like in eyanbinim - I saw them which is like sa - them - w - I all combined into one word.
The direct object goes in the middle of the verb in the present tense which is also confusing at first. Like in eyanbinim - I saw them which is like sa - them - w - I all combined into one word.
HannibalBarka
We are Free
speaks as a native french and arabic, fluently english and i'm learning mandarin. I also am fluent in C, C++, lisp, pascal, vb, etc
Tahuti
Writing Deity
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It was probably earlier. However, Dutch itself was hardly a monolithic language, since Lower Saxon was spoken in Gelderland, for instance.
