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polarn June 23 2011, 16:56:06 UTC
i don't really understand what you'd mean with compare languages which are not closely related, but if you just mean like with "name" then i see. and yeah, i think that's interesting as well....... basically just "language" is interesting haha.

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polarn June 23 2011, 17:23:06 UTC

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lost_hitsu June 23 2011, 16:05:11 UTC
*joins you in linguistic nerdiness* I'd love to see more posts like this!

One of the things I love about the Germanic languages is the fact they are all partly understandable when you can speak one or two of them - I'm fluent in English and German, and as I was in Scandinavia I could understand signs and simpler sentences. Slavic languages are just as much fun since I as Slovak can understand Polish, Russian, Croatian and most of other Slavic groups.

As for Slovak equivalents, dove is "holubica" and grape is "hrozno", and that is "ten", tá" or "to" depending on the gender (M, F and N respectively).

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polarn June 23 2011, 17:37:06 UTC
yeah, especially with swedish/norwegian/danish they are so mutually intelligible it's silly. from knowing german and english, i also understand a lot of dutch hahah... (which happens to be my favourite language so, good for me!)

i've been interested in learning czech after i went to prague some years ago, isn't it also very similar? i don't know any slavic language yet but now that our "apartment neighbours" are polish guys, we end up seeing and hearing polish a bunch hahah, so i've been thinking about it more...

thanks for noting the slovak, i'm always really glad to hear more from a language i don't know much about ´q`

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lost_hitsu June 24 2011, 09:47:28 UTC
Oh I forgot Dutch, another language that is quite understandable in written form for me but I completely fail at the spoken part - but it sounds so interesting, I can see why it is your favourite language!

Czech and Slovak are extremely similar, so much that we don't have to learn it and we understand each other. Although, that might be due to the fact that we read a lot of Czech books and watch Czech tv, and I've heard children, particularly Czech children, have sometimes troubles understanding Slovak.

Polish sounds incredibly funny to us, and I've heard it's mutual - they just have so many soft consonants and everything sounds like they would speak to a child, but that is perhaps only my Slovak POV :)

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chromaticaly June 23 2011, 18:36:50 UTC
gaaah, jagksdl;sd i think things like this are super interesting too! i love comparing languages!! ;w; especially when you can see such similarities and it's almost like you feel you can understand something that's even more fundamental than the lanaguages themselves (if that makes any sense;;;) i also have a secret dream of being able to say at least one thing in almost every language but i have no idea if it will ever come close to happening, ahaha

i think some part of my whole interest can be summarized: "it's a small world after all"

i agree with this statement 100%! o(;A;)o

and it's not really related, but in italian dove is 'colomba' and grape is 'uva'. the only other language i know is japanese and that's totally not similar. XD (dove = 'hato', grape = 'budou')

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polarn June 23 2011, 19:18:13 UTC
yeah, it's how it feels, "i'm getting to the root of it!" hahaha... it's a bit like solving a murder mystery ´w`;;
pff, well, let's keep working, one day we can greet each other in 100 different languages, nicht wahr?

hahah, yeah... well, for things like this you can at least easily compare the romance languages the same way!
i know some japanese but in the end i don't really know what you can go about comparing it too, is there enough similarity between the chinese reading of kanjis and the modern chinese pronounciation?
but it always makes me happy when you hear random german/etc loanwords in japanese hahaha... "arubaito"...

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chromaticaly June 23 2011, 19:45:41 UTC
yes!! it's so awesome. ;w; aah, i love languages. s;kglad alright!! voglio farlo! (ich muss mehr deutsch studieren. ich habe angst vor vergessen. ;A;)

yes! and then sometimes it's really interesting to see latin or greek influence in english or something, too. |D
i'm not that sure... i know that sometimes japanese people can kind of understand chinese if it's written (just the basic general idea of something), but i don't know anything about chinese pronunciation yet, though i hear that korean is really similar grammatically?
haha, yes! i love learning loanwords that aren't from english. XD

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mystofthestars June 23 2011, 20:46:11 UTC
I love etymology as well. I've studied both Latin and Ancient Greek as well and even if we didn't go deep in analyzing etymology all the hints I discovered through the years are so interesting!

Ahah, as Chromaticaly said, in Italian "uva" is grape, and I was like: I see a connection, I see a connection in "druva"! 8D

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mystofthestars June 25 2011, 10:29:30 UTC
Also, it randomly came to my mind that in Italian "bunch of grape" is "grappolo d'uva". And we have grappa which is a sort of liquor that can be distilled from wine as well. So maybe there are still some connections with the word grape?

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polarn July 3 2011, 23:30:43 UTC
sorry for this really slow reply! for some reason LJ wasn't working for me and i couldn't log in for around a week, and after that i was a little busy... ´q`;;

it's interesting! maybe there is a connection with uva after all, who knows?
and grapp- is definitely a connection. haha, when you say grappa, it makes me think of my italian teacher who used that in example sentences often... ´w`

also (a week late, huh?) happy birthday!! ♥

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