Non English Earth languages and alien languages?

[DevilEyes]

We've seen that most of the races in Star Trek will come to speak English as Federation standard, and we all know that on our planet English is harder to learn than almost any other language on Earth, if you're not english that is, so what races do you think could cope with learning and speaking an Earth language other than English?

Really? I didn't know that. I guess I might be an aberration since I found it the easiest to learn.

and we all know that on our planet English is harder to learn than almost any other language on Earth, if you're not english that is

What made you think English is the most difficult language to learn?

Indeed. It's got some of the hardest words to spell, but that's about it. True, as an Anglophone, this is merely a view from the inside, but modern English probably is easier than many languages and has shed difficult features like tone, inflection, and formality. (Fun fact: Thor is being a disrespectful dickhead when he uses thee and thou to refer to people he doesn't know, although as a god who considers himself on par with YHWH, this may be intentional. Only dickishness explains why he talks to other gods in this manner, however.)

English also doesn't have that many irregular verbs--maybe thirty, all of which other than "to be" are easily understandable even if only the basic rules are used ("he runned", "he eated" sound childish, but their meanings are immediately recognizable). Also, our irregular verbs are not as pervasively irregular as in some other languages, nor do we pointlessly have two different irregular verbs for "to be." I'm looking at you, Spanish.

Indeed, English is a language with an unusually simple grammar compared to most Indo-European languages. Interestingly, Old English/Anglo-Saxon had just as complicated grammar as German or French- or Latin- but somehow during the Middle-Ages it lost, or got rid of, many of the inflections for tenses, persons, and cases (the only cases that remain are the subjective and objective case, but only for pronouns, and the Saxon genitive), pretty much all of the inflections for genders, and, most wonderfully, that awful thing called grammatical gender that torments learners of most other European languages...

Incidentally, at the same time, it got that complicated spelling by virtue of undergoing huge changes in pronunciation (such as the great vowel shift from the 15th century) while making very few changes to its spelling over the course of 1000 years. If you look at a Middle English text, or even an Old English one, many words will look familiar, but if you hear them pronounced... not so much. (Like OE 'cniht" - very similar to 'knight'... except that it was actually pronounced as 'kNIHt'). Old English doesn't even sound like English at all, it sounds like a completely different language.

Not to mention gender. The concept that words, in and of themselves, can be masculine or feminine seems a tad absurd to most English speakers, especially to children learning a second language.

Even if it's not absurd because your own language has grammatical gender (as in my case), it's always a pain to have to remember whether "chair" or "snake" or "anger" is masculine, feminine or neuter in French, while it may be completely different in German, in Italian, in Russian, and so on...

And knowing the Klingon aesthetic sense, some Klingons might want to learn Dutch. They'd consider it a pretty-sounding language. To most anglophones, Dutch sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball.

Nah, doesn't bother me...now FRENCH...THAT sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball. With a cold.

You must be joking. French is beautiful music to the ears. Second prettiest language: Brazilian Portuguese.

This is completely subjective, but I would say that the nicest sounding languages are French, Italian and Spanish, in that order. Though a lot depends on the accent. For some reason, I love the sound of English with the Scottish accent...

It also depends a lot on the speaker/singer and the context. If you are used to hearing German in WW2 movies with Third Reich soldiers shouting 'HALT! WOHIN?', you will come to think it's a harsh, ugly language and never realize how beautiful it can be until you hear someone singing a tender or melancholic song in German. And no other language could ever convey the stern, dark, tragic melancholy of Nico than German:
Nico in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JHS35c-K6U
Beautiful and tragic, but not nearly as much as this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4peFis8bmgg

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I've never thought German sounded that bad. Often I tend to find it amusing more than anything, because of the words that sound like English, but aren't. I bet German speakers find English and Dutch to be very similar, in how they perceive them.

Regarding English, it's not exactly a pidgin language, but it definitely went through some of the simplifications it did because of the Norman invasion and the massive influx of French words. (Though honestly, I find that English acts more like Spanish grammatically than French--that is, if ANY comparison to a Romance language could even be made beyond a very superficial one.)

 

[Tora Ziyal]

But symbionts can go into William T. Riker!

But not for very long. Wasn't that part of the plot?

 

[Tora Ziyal]

I can picture Klingons speaking German. Vulcans speaking Latin in formal or academic settings. Andorians speaking French, perhaps.

BTW, I used to teach English to speakers of other languages -- in some cases it was their fourth or fifth language -- and it was not uncommon to hear them say that they found English to be the hardest to learn.

 

[stj]

I'm not much on linguistics, so if you're really interested independent research is advised. That said, French in Haiti was partly learned by the slaves, informally. The resulting language, the tongue of the majority of Haitians, is Creole. The language developing as a result of such a process is a creole. In many respects English appears to be a creole developed by the Anglo-Saxon peasantry after the Norman conquest.

Creoles appear to have what is called (I think) an analytical syntax, wherein word order, instead of declensions (changes in word endings) as in most Indo-European languages, or word compounding (agglutinative) languages like Turkish (and Finnish too?,) are the main carriers of meaning. I've forgotten the name for languages which change the interiors of the phonemes (languages like Arabic.) It is interesting that Chinese languages are analytical, word order determining meaning. "Chinese" was a creole developing in the aftermath of the Zhou conquest of the Shang?

But language is a complex phenomenon. Welsh has mutations, changes inside the morpheme instead of the endings, vaguely like Arabic. French has traces of a tonal structure. German has a rather strict word order for verbs. Russian has an extremely inflected language but compounds and acronyms and portmanteaus seem to play a significant part as well.

Tones and glottal stops/clicks aren't considered part of grammar I think. But languages without what native English speakers would consider verbs still seem to serve their speakers. (Tewa, Towa, Tiwa, I think, Pueblo Indian languages, if I recall.)

 

[Gul Re'jal]

It is interesting that Chinese languages are analytical, word order determining meaning. "Chinese" was a creole developing in the aftermath of the Zhou conquest of the Shang?

Which "Chinese" language do you mean exactly? Mandarin? It's an artificial language. Other languages: eg. Cantonese, Shangainese, Minnan - Vulcans would love the logic behind creating words and specific grammar rules that apply to them.

 

[stj]

Which "Chinese" language do you mean exactly? Mandarin? It's an artificial language. Other languages: eg. Cantonese, Shangainese, Minnan - Vulcans would love the logic behind creating words and specific grammar rules that apply to them.

I'm pretty sure the languages of the Wu, Min and Hakka are not the ones I mean. As to Mandarin being "artificial," I imagine it is artificial in the same sense as the ancient Greek koine, the literary Norwegian dialect or Sanskrit in India. Namely, a perfectly natural dialect elevated to a preferred position by historical political and social forces. In the case of Mandarin, I believed it was the main northern dialect, particularly that around Beijing. I would think of the Chinese equivalent of Pali in India. Whatever dialect/language was spoken in Xi'an during the former Zhou dynasty? (Not the eastern Zhou.)

As to artificial, would Shanghainese count, since Shanghai is what, less than two hundred years old? Hasn't it always been an entrepot for European trade? Or is it pretty much the same as the dialect spoken around Nanjing before the founding of Shanghai?