A few days ago I was talking about languages here and now found an article in The Economist about that very subject: whether some languages are more difficult than others to learn, and, if so, which ones. And the general question of comparing them.
Tongue twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language. This goes a little beyond the Mario Pei
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I don't feel much desire to learn Tuyuca, but I love knowing about it.
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In Old English we have the dual form as well as the plural. I, you-&-I, and we, throughout its many cases.
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I wonder if I can guess from this that Indo-European, or Proto-Indo-European, had the dual form? - Which got lost with time in certain or many branches of the language. Damn - I wish I knew something about Hindi.
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That seems strange. Do they call it "those things on our hands"?
or numbers
Like Trolls in Terry Pratchett: one, and another, and another...
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LOL.
Neat article - I now know that Maltese is an agglutinating langauge. It's one of the things that made it hard to learn as a second language, and I'm still fascinated by the complications of agglutinations and irregular verbs and gender. E.g. I gave it (m.) to him is tajtulu, I gave it (m.) to her is tajtulha, I gave it (m) to them is tajtulhom. He gave it (m) to me is tahuli, she gave it (f) to me is tathieli. And so on... Silent h throughout, and I'm not 100% sure of the spelling of everything - aaargh!
I've started learning Spanish again. So much easier!
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Yeah, Spanish would be easier... Though I know very little Spanish. But I can often figure it out from the languages I do know.
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Let's not forget Ludwig (Ludovic) Zamenhof, who invented Esperanto! :-)
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