Languages We Speak
- Thread starter Livia
- Start date
I actually became fluent in a very rude form of that frightfull tongue as a result of an otherwise unprofitable work experience. Speaking it felt like changing gears in a rusty old bus; and yet all of that horrible hissing and sushing and sputtering left me craving a knowledge of Staroslov. Ancient languages have always held more of an interest for me.
But due to all that "horrible hissing, shushing, and sputtering", there is a rumor going around that Slavs are better equipped to learn foreign tongues than others, on account of the relative "softness" of their speech and pliancy of tongue.
It may have occupy'd me in bit of study, but I am nonethless unwilling to count Anglo Saxon separately from my mother tongue. English is a continuum to me, all of it ever present.
I hope you won't think I'm being gratuitously disputative, because really I'm just curious, but do you see Old French (Norman) and the contribution from the Scandinavian languages, for example, as equally valid and ever-present parts of that continuum?
Yes, but not in the same sense, as their cointributions to English, important as they were, were for the most part only contributions of vocabulary.
In the light of all this, sorry for my language, dick measuring I have to contribute with my list of known languages:
* Ansi C
* C++
* Java
* PHP
* English
* Ruby
* Assembly Language
* Pascal
* Pike
* Swedish
* Foul language
* SQL
* PL/SQL
* Bash
* PCL 5
* Danish
* Bourne Shell
* German
* Ksh
* Csh
* Zshell
* Perl
* Awk
* Norwegian
* Basic
* Javascript
* Postscript
* Python
* Ruby
* TCL
* ... and working with all the above languages makes me an expert in Foul Language
And I've probably forgot to mention a few others that I've come accross. Throw me any other language from my kind of world and I will be able to read and understand it. Beat that if you can!
* Ansi C
* C++
* Java
* PHP
* English
* Ruby
* Assembly Language
* Pascal
* Pike
* Swedish
* Foul language
* SQL
* PL/SQL
* Bash
* PCL 5
* Danish
* Bourne Shell
* German
* Ksh
* Csh
* Zshell
* Perl
* Awk
* Norwegian
* Basic
* Javascript
* Postscript
* Python
* Ruby
* TCL
* ... and working with all the above languages makes me an expert in Foul Language
And I've probably forgot to mention a few others that I've come accross. Throw me any other language from my kind of world and I will be able to read and understand it. Beat that if you can!
You've included several programming, scripting, and other computer languages, but I believe the original language list consisted of only spoken languages. Your list is interesting, nonetheless.
Consentio...
Merged and moved to appropriate thread.
I primarily speak English. I can speak French almost fluently, but I can read it much better. I can read basic Latin.
English, German, Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, in descending order of speaking proficiency. I've been doing Arabic for about a year, so I can do a little of that, too, but most of it is Modern Standard, which isn't actually spoken as a mother tongue by anybody.
Aren't you forgetting a few ones (Latin, French, Spanish, Greek...)? Or are you only mentioning those you feel (to some extent) "fluent" in?
Oh, I took the title of the thread at its word: "languages we speak"
 Tongue.gif "(1) Tongue out :p")
It's also true that my Greek and French are rather too rudimentary for me to qualify as proficient in them either. On the other hand, I allowed myself to count Mandarin as a language I "spoke"; if literacy were factored in, I wouldn't be able to count Chinese at all.
By the way, Aurifex's command of Chinese is astonishingly impressive. He ran circles around me in the Chinese thread with his characters