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taufan99

Let's talk about lesser-known languages!

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Languages play an important role in everyday life. In fact, some of us use two (or more) languages on a daily basis.

In the international society, of course there are some people (like you and me) who are fascinated in languages. But how many of us are also into lesser-known languages? Let's share about them and your interest of them in this thread.

I recently found this particular language, which, according to Wikipedia, is a reconstructed language based on the extinct languages spoken by the Tasmanian aboriginals.

 

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The mayan lenguages, still not extinct but dangereously close, are very interesting and really special sounding, you can when somebody is speaking a pre-colonial lenguage here in my country.

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Gaelic is making a bit of comeback.   The British tried their best to utterly erase it.

 

If my grammar is right... Chuir mé crann úll

means I planted an apple tree.

(I grew one over 6 ft tall from a seed of an apple I ate, but deer killed it).

I'm something like over 25% to over 1/3 Celtic.   At least five different Irish ancestors and plus a Scot on the English side of the border came over when the British were conducting genocide of the Irish, confiscating all kinds of food and livestock at gunpoint and exporting them in the 1850's while it's been hushed up as simple potato famine starving everyone.

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In my country, Paraguay, we have 2 official languages, Spanish and Guarani.

Guarani was the language of the natives before we got conquered, it's writing is lost but it adapted well to the one the Spanish bought, it has some quirks like nasal vowels and a lot of it is a big mix of other words which personally makes it confusing to me.

Eventually we got the unnofficial "Jopara", means mix, which is mixing Guarani and Spanish and is how most people use it on the capital, while if you go deeper in the country most people start talking pure Guarani.

My favorite word is "Y" it means water.

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44 minutes ago, Remilia Scarlet said:

Mi parolas iomete Esperanton, kaj mi neniam renkontis alia persono ke parolas ĝin.

Well I understood that, apart from "neniam" which I had to look up.

 

Nowadays I look back at the time I spent learning Esperanto and think I'd would be better off to have learnt French or some other real language.

 

As a Tasmanian, I'd like to say something about the original post but I don't have much to add.  In Australia there were a huge number of Aboriginal languages, possibly more than 1000, most of them are extinct now.  I believe Palawa Kani is not based on a single language, but recreated from known remnants of several extinct Tasmanian languages.  There's been a few place names here which have been given additional names in that language, I know some of them when I hear them but not well enough to produce them myself.

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DoomSpeak is surprisingly effective:

Hurt:

"Ah-euhhh!"

 

Pissed:

"Waieul!"

 

DoomSpeak is not really liberal with compliments, however.

 

(Interesting tidbit, InDoom!l

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@Gokuma Gaelic languages intimidate me when I look at them, but I respect the native speakers for striving to keep them alive.

@Endless @Senor500 Glad to hear indigenous South American languages are as lively as Spanish nowadays! I always wondered if the official status is of any effect for them.

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15 hours ago, InDOOMnesia said:

@Gokuma Gaelic languages intimidate me when I look at them, but I respect the native speakers for striving to keep them alive.

@Endless @Senor500 Glad to hear indigenous South American languages are as lively as Spanish nowadays! I always wondered if the official status is of any effect for them.

Here in Guatemala, the official lenguage is Spanish, but theres also 22 officialy recognized indigenious lenguages. K'iche' being the most diverse of the bunch with 1 million speakers, and sadly, Xinca the least spoken with only 100 speakers alive. The Xinca is a very isolated lenguage, it almost went extinct during the spanish conquest.

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Let's talk about Korean, because there's somebody who keeps posting topics here in Korean and I would like somebody to translate it for me.  

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^ 제가 번역해드릴 수 있긴한데, 어차피 전부 다 도박 사이트 광고글들이라 번역할 만한 가치가 없습니다.

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I wonder if you can use machine-learning to reconstruct holes in our understanding of dead languages? Because unfortunately, colonialism has some a fuckton of damage to languages across the world.

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For lesser known languages, how about dialects? Here in Italy they're almost similar to new languages, it depends where you live...

 

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1 hour ago, Walter confetti said:

Here in Italy they're almost similar to new languages, it depends where you live...

Indeed, they are different languages. I know some words of Neapolitan for example and it even has a third, neuter gender like German does. 

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@Walter confetti I've been a long-time fan of Langfocus. About time somebody mentioned one of his videos here!

Speaking of which, those local languages/dialects remind me of how divergent Malay variants all around Nusantara (Maritime Southeast Asia) are.

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I grew up in Cornwall, UK. The Cornish language (Kernewek), a relative of the more prominent Welsh, was actually considered extinct, but revival efforts have managed to bring it back from the dead relatively recently, though it's still not spoken as a first language to my knowledge, and probably never will be again tbh.

For the most part I only ever really saw it on stuff like road signs, but occasionally came across other things like buses which had assortments of Cornish words and phrases and their translations printed above the windows and on the back of seats etc.

 

Apparently it's even taught in some schools but that wasn't the case for me.

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I learn some lesser-known languages, especially, turkic: bashkir, chuvash, karachay-balkar, yakut, kumyk and other one.

Also I learn kalmyk and buryat languages.

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In Uruguay there's just spanish, although it adapted to the languages of the tribes that used to live in the territory (not exclusive to Uruguay, with territory i refer to River plate, wich is shared with Argentina) words like "Ñandú" or "Yacaré" are adaptiations from Guaraní (most words we use are from guaraní, but there's some words from other languages of the territory)

Uruguay has a bad story with these tribes and groups, i suggest reading about it, it's intresting.

PD: The name itself of Uruguay is a guaraní word.

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On 4/14/2020 at 7:36 PM, Eris Falling said:

I grew up in Cornwall, UK. The Cornish language (Kernewek), a relative of the more prominent Welsh, was actually considered extinct, but revival efforts have managed to bring it back from the dead relatively recently, though it's still not spoken as a first language to my knowledge, and probably never will be again tbh.

For the most part I only ever really saw it on stuff like road signs, but occasionally came across other things like buses which had assortments of Cornish words and phrases and their translations printed above the windows and on the back of seats etc.

 

Apparently it's even taught in some schools but that wasn't the case for me.

Yeah, I remember that. They were even trying to write songs in Cornish, weren't they? 

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5 hours ago, TheStupidestBeing said:

In Uruguay there's just spanish, although it adapted to the languages of the tribes that used to live in the territory (not exclusive to Uruguay, with territory i refer to River plate, wich is shared with Argentina) words like "Ñandú" or "Yacaré" are adaptiations from Guaraní (most words we use are from guaraní, but there's some words from other languages of the territory)

Uruguay has a bad story with these tribes and groups, i suggest reading about it, it's intresting.

PD: The name itself of Uruguay is a guaraní word.

Actually the territory of nomadic tribes such as Charruas, Genoas, and Chanás used to range from southern Buenos Aires province up to northern Rio Grande do Sul state.

Guaraní has a strong influence in our vocabulary, but not sure if most words we use come from it, aside from spanish, there is also a strong italian influence due to having recieved inmigration from there since 1840 until late 1950's, words such as "guarda", "facha", "laubro", "berreta", "trucho", "guambia"," ñoqui", "bocha", etc.

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6 hours ago, Solmyr said:

Guaraní has a strong influence in our vocabulary, but not sure if most words we use come from it, aside from spanish, there is also a strong italian influence due to having recieved inmigration from there since 1840 until late 1950's, words such as "guarda", "facha", "laubro", "berreta", "trucho", "guambia"," ñoqui", "bocha", etc.

Wow, i knew about the italian migrations, but not that those words had italian influence! The more you know...

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