What is your favorite Language?

Post » Mon Jan 16, 2017 12:55 am

Aramaic is still spoken in some areas. I've met Iraqui refugees who spoke this language, along with Arabic.




Interesting. We here have a kind of similar but more general way to make names / words feminine or masculine.


In general masculine words end with consonants, and feminine with vowels. But that's only true for 'modern' Greek, in the ancient tongue there were female names ending with consonants too!



As for my favorite language ? That's kind of hard to answer. Definately the most useful language I got to learn and speak is English.


I think its nice listening to Spanish and maybe Italian, but I don't have a motive to learn how to speak them. Although it would be comparatively easy, because


they are Latin-based languages, and many of its words are recognizable.



A language I'd like to be able to speak is "ancient" Greek, but that's too hard. Because of a number of reasons. Essentially Greek is one language ever-changing and evolving so much that Koine (Common) Greek of the testament is a different beast from classic era Attic Greek (the form in which most classics are written, from people like Plato, Aristotle, Thucidedes,etc), and even that looks easier compared to the archaic form that Homer and Hesiod use. One who speaks its modern form (like me) will understand less and less text depending on its age. Koine is 95% understandable although it has an unusual feel. But in Classical Attic one understands like 2/5s or 2/4s of it. And of Homeric Greek, it would be luck to find some unserstandable words here and there... What amazes me is that some roots of words have been the same for like at least 3000 years, and thus one can get an idea about the word he is reading by recognizing that root, and how the ancients combined roots to make words so much. From my understanding they used them like Lego Blocks, very liberally, making up complex words that each can be describing so much... As if they thought that using more words in a sentence was a bad thing, and they tried hard to make up composites just to shorten the word count in each sentence.


Recently I did a vocabulary check of ancient Greek words, and I found words that have no equivalent single word in modern Greek, and I also think neither in English.



Here a few examples:



αντερ? (antero): A verb for when someone responds positively to the love of another person and gives it back love.


εν?δα (enada): The concept a total of individual parts behaving in such a unison and oneness so as to act as a single.



Even the ancient and still in use word ?νθρωπο? (anthropos = human) is a composite made of a whole sentence, "?νω θρ? και ?ππωπε" (ano thro kai opope) which literaly translates "one who gazes up and contemplates".


Supposedly that's how they called humans in very ancient times because of all beings, we were the only ones to ever gaze upwards to the stars with curiosity.

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