Finnish with what…?
Yiddish because I love to hear words and phrases that sound like Swiss German.
I self-taught myself English (computing was cool, computing => English) when I was about 15, and my first non-textbook readings were of Turbo Pascal help screens. I think to this day my English syntax is biased with “if…then…else” and semicolons.
Had I time I’d learn Japanese or Arabic.
I swear some languages were only invented to piss off the germans
An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and im- pressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all
the ten parts of speech—not in regular order, but mixed; it is built
mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot,
and not to be found in any dictionary—six or seven words com- pacted into one, without joint or seam—that is, without hyphens;
it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in
a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses,
which re-enclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making
pens with pens; finally, all the parentheses and re-parentheses are
massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which
is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other
in the middle of the last line of it—after which comes the verb, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking
about; and after the verb—merely by way of ornament, as far as I
can make out,—the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt
haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument
is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of
the flourish to a man’s signature—not necessary, but pretty. Mark Twain
Or perhaps the French: they are very allergic to English when for example you go straight and begin talking in English. In Anwerp they are very allergic to French and German.
Esperanto. Every engineer, mathematician, etc would love it as there is no exceptions so the grammar is very simple. Meh, but apart from the excitement and curiosity I won’t bother with it, it’s of no use
Ha, interesting you started with Pascal, I started with C (they are quite similar) and even now, every now and then I open a copy of Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchies The C Programming Language as the most dense, beautifully written no nonsense book on programming.
As to human languages, Id really wish I didn’t speak Russian and spoke Greek and Farsi. Farsi is beautifully poetic, contextual and subtle, wish I spent more time studying it. Greek id rather want to know for practical purposes…I never know if they are arguing with me or are telling me something nice, it all sounds loud, beautiful and slightly menacing at the same time.
Decades ago I was on a day trip to Bruges (from the UK) and it was the only time, in Flanders, that I’ve deliberately used French rather than English. The place was crawling with mostly drunken Brits, I wanted to be served in a restaurant, I knew they’d dislike me if they though I was French but they would likely expect me to complain if I got poor service. Seemed to work.
(I should say I’d worked in Brussels some years earlier so was not unaware of the language politics in that area).
That’s because of a Pascal book I found in my high school library, the book said Pascal was created to teach programming, so I continued with it, I had neither a computer nor an access to one at that time
Ah, clear I started in our schools “computer club” as there was the promise that in the last 15 min of the classes we will be allowed to play Beyond Castle Wolfenstein…aaa, the good ol’ days of MS-DOS. Moved from C to C++ and by the time Java and C# were around I lost interest in programming and had to switch majors at college as a sophomore I now occasionally play with PHP and MySQL for some useless home projects just to pretend I’m a programmer.
In the old days I learned PostScript and was one of the first who could make text follow a curve, or write text in a circle.
I was so proud of myself until the “expert” typesetters came and totally dissed my baby steps, then Illustrator came out and did it as a feature.
So I gave up.
From the little experience that I have now, I think learning Swiss German is a lot more challenging than hochdeutsch because there are not much literature available and it is a very localized dialect: St. Gallen, Zuri, Aargau and Bern Deutsch don’t always use the same words, expression and the pronunciation is often very different. I think Swiss Germans can guess where someone is from just by listening to their dialect.
In Germany, Bavaria German is very different to the rest of Germany 's German.
I think in Europe Hungarian and Greek are the hardest languages. Polish isn’t easy either. Nobody in Germany learns Polish. English, French and Spanish are more popular.
Baden-Württemberg as well, and Vorarlberg in Austria.
Here’s why (the German version of the page is more extensive should you be interested).
There is a distinct language barrier along the river Lech. To the west you hear the Swabian, for instance some towns and villages have the “ingen” suffax; Aitingen, Bobingen… whereas to the east is more Bavarian and you don’t hear that at all.
Sadly the rich tapestry of the dialects is dying out and being replaced by either Hochdeutsch as more and more “Saupreiß’n” move in, or a watered down Munich dialect. Same with the dialects in Baden-Württemberg, the “Gelbfüßler” now have that atrocious Stuttgarter nasal sound that makes you want to blow air up their noses.
I am interested to connect languages that are very similar but still considered separate languages but natives can nevertheless communicate without any ease. I want to create a list to which I want to add such languages:
- Dutch-Flemish vs Africains
- French vs Quebecois
- German vs Yiddish
- Bulgarian vs Macedonian
- Russian vs Ukrainian
- Estonian vs Finnish
- Danish vs Swedish vs Norwegian
- Arabic vs Hebrew??
- Spanish vs Catalan vs Portuguese
- Maltese vs Italian
- Indonesian vs Malay
- Turkish vs Kurdish vs Kazakh
- Cantonese vs Mandarin
14 …
Without any ease? By any chance did you mean “with ease”?
Check this map. Anyway it’s funny to read this in Italian without ever making an attempt to learn it formally. Even reading this legend in the top left:
Language mutually intelligible are those which their respective speakers have a relative ease to understand the other language without learning it first.
I had no idea Azerbaijani is so close to Turkish. Even closer that Spanish-Italian. Now I understand and feel sorry for Armenia…