A language learners’ forum

Ogrim wrote:To me a more interesting question would be why there are some languages "nobody" seems to study. I may be wrong, but in all my years at HTLAL and LLorg I cannot remember anyone seriously studying e.g. Armenian, which has some eight million speakers scattered around the world. Or what about Guaraní, an official language of Paraguay and the native language of more than six million people? I guess if I were to give up on Arabic and Russian for five years I'd pick one or both of these.

Javanese is one of those languages that is criminally underrepresented for its population. Caray, it's one of the most spoken languages in the world! To be honest, I think even Indonesian is underrepresented here in Australia. My high school offered it as a subject, but most students chose French or Japanese, even though Indonesia is a lot closer to Australia than France or Japan. In the language market, Indonesian could definitely do with selling itself better.

What a great topic!

Excluding dead languages, it would be interesting to learn:
Estonian (just started working on this)
Icelandic
Some of the smaller Uralic languages, like Meadow Mari or Udmurt
A northwest Caucasian language like Abkhaz or Kabardian
Hmmm, we need some Indo-Iranian. How about Ossetian?

Of course there are lots more I'd be interested in. But once you get down to something like Abhaz with 100,000 speakers, or less, it gets really difficult to find learning material, or interesting native material, unless you've got something heavily subsidized and promoted by the government, e.g. the insular Celtic languages.

Ogrim wrote:I may be wrong, but in all my years at HTLAL and LLorg I cannot remember anyone seriously studying e.g. Armenian, which has some eight million speakers scattered around the world.

I remember that Richard Simcott (Torbyrne on HTLAL) was studying it a few years ago.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:

Ogrim wrote:I may be wrong, but in all my years at HTLAL and LLorg I cannot remember anyone seriously studying e.g. Armenian, which has some eight million speakers scattered around the world.

I remember that Richard Simcott (Torbyrne on HTLAL) was studying it a few years ago.

Is there any language Richard Simcott hasn’t studied?

Lithuanian should be included here, although it is one million above the suggested limit. There were numerous predictions of its slow death in the nineteenth century when the 100.000 speakers of it in Prussia were in the focus of the philologists/Indo-Europeanists. It is dead in Germany now but with Lithuanian independence from Russia after WWI it had a revival in its homeland.
It is said to be the most archaic living Indo-European language.

Kraut wrote:It is said to be the most archaic living Indo-European language.

Not sure... The original quote was "if you want to know what Proto-Indo-European sounded like, listen to a Lithuanian peasant" which focuses mostly on the (reconstructed) pronunciation and specific features like many words ending in -s.

Ogrim wrote:Is there any language Richard Simcott hasn’t studied?

I see your point. Armenian probably isn't (wasn't?) his (or anyone else's) main target language. Some languages have people you instantly know you can ask if you have questions.

Serpent wrote:

Kraut wrote:It is said to be the most archaic living Indo-European language.

Not sure... The original quote was "if you want to know what Proto-Indo-European sounded like, listen to a Lithuanian peasant" which focuses mostly on the (reconstructed) pronunciation and specific features like many words ending in -s.

The quote is from the French linguist Meillet, but I think it is much more than pronunciation. Lithuanian morphology is extremely complicated. Although they kicked the grammatical dual form when they standardised Lithuanian at the beginning of the 20th century, it was present in most word classes (verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, demonstratives ...) as can be seen in this guide book from Prussia.
http://www.epaveldas.lt/vbspi/biRecord. ... rdId=24692
And this looks very close to Sanskrit, which is 3000 years away.

I know.
As for Sanskrit, can you give an example of the similarity?
Slovene also has dual btw.

Personally I would tell the millionaire guy to stick his money because there are easier ways to get a million dollars than to learn a new language from scratch.