What's the most exotic language you speak or have studied?

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I'll start this one off, as I have 2!

1. Woleaian, spoken on the island of Fais in Yap State, Micronesia (and some other islands not in Yap).

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=WOE

I unfortunately only spent a week here, after studying on my own for a month in preparation. I spent hours and hours with the local kids on the beach (well, the whole place was beach...) trying to figure out the treacherous counting system!

2. Tigrinya (alternately spelled Tigrigna due to Italian colonization), spoken mostly in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=TGN

I'm currently writing a paper on nominalizations in this language, based on a 3-month field course with a Tigrinya informant.

PS Dead and artificial languages count! Computer languages, etc., don't.

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Oy, well, some Hebrew. But I've forgotten most of it. I do recall T'munot means pictures. Dov means bear, dag means fish and kelev is dog. Abba is father, Ema is mother and 1 - 10 is: Echad, Shtayim, Sh'losh, Arba, Chamesh, Shesh, Sheva, Shmona, Teysha and Eser. Melech is King, Malka is Queen.

After that, I'm mainly stumped but I some things do jar a bit of it back, like prayers (e. g. Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheynu Melech H'Olam means Blessed are you, oh Lord, our God, king of the universe - I remember that because it's a fairly standard opening for prayers).

I know even less Yiddish. Balaboste is a good housewife; her husband is a Balabos. Mensch is a fine, upstanding individual of either gender. Shlemiel is a klutz or idiot. Shlemazl is an unfortunate soul, the kind of person with a cloud over his head, only raining on him and no one else.

Otherwise, I've studied French and Spanish but they're not exactly what anyone would call exotic.

PS Welcome - I keep wanting to read your name as mezzaluna. Hmmm. :-D

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Pardon the aside, but are these words, "Shlemiel is a klutz or idiot. Shlemazl is an unfortunate soul" featured in the Lavern and Shirley theme song?

I studied french in school, italian out of school, on my own. And, in addition, I own dictionaries for Japanese and kechuan (hmmm, howzit spelled?) a native language of the andes mountains.

Mezzie, I bet you take the cake on this site for knowledge of exotic languages..... then there is Pueo who knows hawaiian.

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Quechua!

Cool. Smile

One of my classmates (from Guatemala) speaks Nahuatl and several other Meso-American native languages.

I know bits and pieces of Hebrew, too, which is actually related to Tigrinya (they are both Semitic languages).

Yiddish I don't know at all, though when I was a kid I used to think that one's Yiddish skills grew as one aged. My great-grandparents spoke it fluently, grandparents knew lots of phrases, parents know a couple of phrases and some odd words, and I knew none. Gotta love the logic of kids!

I know no Hawaiian but know a bit about its sound system, which is extremely simple, containing very few consonants, which is why English words become largely unrecognizable when borrowed! (example: Merry Christmas --> Mele Kalikimaka)

Hawaiian only has the following consonants: p, k, h, m, n, w, l and ? (glottal stop). It also only permits sequences of consonant-vowel.

In other words, "Christmas" is a tongue-twister in and of itself for Hawaiian speakers! The 2 s's become k's, the r becomes l, and all the consonant-consonant sequences are broken up by vowels. It actually is an extremely predictable and regular pattern, if you know what you're looking for!

Link to English/Hawaiian loan words, and a good, if simplified, introduction to phonology (the study of how sounds pattern in human language):

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Phonology.html

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Hmm, I don't think Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams realized that, yep, their theme song contained Shlemiel, Shlemazel, Hassenpfeffer Incorporated (etc.).

Quechua. Funky.

I know what you mean re Yiddish and, unfortunately, given the fact that it isn't spoken much, that's almost true. Most speakers are elderly. My brother speaks some (he's not elderly), but he's made an effort and he also studied German, which helps. Dad tells me a number of things in Yiddish, and the only expression I remember is Zayin mit a gitte shoe <-- which does not mean "Wear comfortable shoes". Rather, it means, all will happen in good time (e. g. to everything there is a season).

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I understand some of what my mother says in Yiddish. (She has definitely started using it more as she's gotten older, but that's because she has found a friend who knows a little more than she does and they egg each other on.) I couldn't begin to write the Yiddish that I know because I've never seen it written, so don't know where one word ends and another starts.

I had 6 years of French in school. Learned a bit of Spanish and Italian so I wouldn't feel so useless when travelling to those countries.

I once studied Gaelic just for fun for a few months. Didn't get too far because I couldn't find anyone to converse with.

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I have been trying to learn how to pronounce Brijbhasha, a Hindi dialect spoken in Brindaban (thanks Gautam) to better understand the rythym of the medieval Indian poet Bihari, who I love in translation, but the poetry is written in couplets, which don't translate the same way into English.

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French.

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I read, write and speak in Tamil which is my mother tongue. Its spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu in India. It is one of the ancient language in the world - dating back to Mohanjcadaro and Harappa civilizations. It was found that some of the symbols used by Harappan civilizations is of Tamil. And know that, Harappan civilisization date is 2000 BC and to date it adds to 4000 years......

Besides Tamil, I also speak Malayalam and Kannada which also belongs to the same Dravidian group of languages as Tamil, which is the oldest. These two languages are spoken by people in kerala and karnataka respectively.....

Also I can read Arabic when written with proper symbols. But I couldn't make head and tail out of it.... Only I know to read the quran....

Similarly Hindi...... I can read and understand a bit...... Hindi is the language of the northern states of India..... Now, I am trying to learn the same to speak better and use as a business language....

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I guess that's arabic... though it's not really exotic.

How about... dutch? :Þ

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Tigrinya- especially its script and antiquity- has always fascinated me.

Agh... I've always been one for conventional languages; the languages that I speak the best are good old Romance languages. I do know bits and pieces of some very strange languages, as I always try to learn the language of where I visit on holiday, as I don't think that one can feel the real essence of the culture surrounding you without doing this. So, in the past, I've learnt Sardinian (really like Latin); Danish (easy grammar, hard to pronounce); Polish (bad memories of five consonants, one after the other) and Thai... but I wouldn't class myself as fluent in any of them. I'm trying to learn Hungarian as I love Hungary, and am in the middle of writing a book about the country that has been on the wrong side of almost every war in Europe...

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Courtesy of the United States Air Force I (once) read, spoke and understood Indonesian. I have about ten words left in my memory.

I do however speak Texan, Tulsan (Oklahoma) and New Yorker.
I often translate for friends.

For example, to turn something off a Texan mashes down on a button whereas the Tulsan presses it and the New Yorker punches it. Bill Gates would have you click on Start, but that's another language altogether.

Look at these differences in expressing appreciation:

Texan Think Q.

Tulsan Thankx furry mush

New Yorker (door slams)

===
A final example of differences would be in how to tell if one of these speakers is lying:

Tulsan "I sware on the Tulsa grave of Will Rogers."
Lie: Will is buried way over in Claremore.

New Yorker "I swear un muh granmudder's eyes."
Possible lie: Look for lack of eye contact and sweaty forehead.

Texan: "We know he has large stocks of weapons of mass destruction"

'nuff said.

Joe

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Joe Nation wrote:

Courtesy of the United States Air Force I (once) read, spoke and understood Indonesian. I have about ten words left in my memory.

I do however speak Texan, Tulsan (Oklahoma) and New Yorker.
I often translate for friends.

For example, to turn something off a Texan mashes down on a button whereas the Tulsan presses it and the New Yorker punches it. Bill Gates would have you click on Start, but that's another language altogether.

Look at these differences in expressing appreciation:

Texan Think Q.

Tulsan Thankx furry mush

New Yorker (door slams)

===
A final example of differences would be in how to tell if one of these speakers is lying:

Tulsan "I sware on the Tulsa grave of Will Rogers."
Lie: Will is buried way over in Claremore.

New Yorker "I swear un muh granmudder's eyes."
Possible lie: Look for lack of eye contact and sweaty forehead.

Texan: "We know he has large stocks of weapons of mass destruction"

'nuff said.

Joe

How true... if you think the differences in America are bamboozling, look at the UK; you need only go fifty miles, and the accents, expressions, etc, are completely different!

By the way, Joe, have you ever considered trying to relearn Indonesian? Were you once based there?

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Never based there. I was at DLI in 1967-68 and didn't look at any Indonesian for years.

A few years ago a friend asked me to translate the words of an Indonesian lullaby. I was stunned at how much I remembered, I was stunned at how little I knew. I had to go to the library and get a English/Indonesian dictionary and muddle through. Recently my wife has been designing jewelry with a local woman who lived in Sumatra for about three years. We speak a few words to eachother, but there's not much interest on my part for re-learning.

Salamat

Joe

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Mezzie- Interesting thread. I am afraid that I know a smattering of a number of languages, none terribly exotic.

I studied Hebrew as a child. Don't remember much, but can still read it. I know a fair amount of Yiddish, mostly because I wanted to know what my parents didn't want me to hear. Took French in high school, and Russian in college. As an adult I took some Spanish in adult ed.

Nothing very exciting!

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I went to visit relatives in Germany a few years ago. My two cousins (aged 8 and 9 at the time) spoke German and English well, from going to local schools there.

But their mother spoke Lithuanian best, so that's what they spoke with her at home. And their father was Spanish, so they would switch languages when speaking to him, and also wave their arms a lot. Oh, and the housekeeper was teaching them Icelandic.

Now this is the funny part. Between the two of them, they couldn't find a common language because there were five common languages. So they merged German, English, Lithuanian, Spanish and Icelandic into a mish-mash language that only the two of them could understand. It was their own private way of communicating when all the adults were around.

I studied them for a whole summer and couldn't understand any of it. But then, I'm from America and we don't go too much for other cultures around here. Drop a few bombs, take over some businesses, pretty soon everybody speaks English.

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Heh heh....nice comment there on America PatriUgg. Actually, your story regarding the relatives and their secret language is fascinating to me.

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PatriUgg wrote:

I went to visit relatives in Germany a few years ago. My two cousins (aged 8 and 9 at the time) spoke German and English well, from going to local schools there.

But their mother spoke Lithuanian best, so that's what they spoke with her at home. And their father was Spanish, so they would switch languages when speaking to him, and also wave their arms a lot. Oh, and the housekeeper was teaching them Icelandic.

Now this is the funny part. Between the two of them, they couldn't find a common language because there were five common languages. So they merged German, English, Lithuanian, Spanish and Icelandic into a mish-mash language that only the two of them could understand. It was their own private way of communicating when all the adults were around.

I studied them for a whole summer and couldn't understand any of it. But then, I'm from America and we don't go too much for other cultures around here. Drop a few bombs, take over some businesses, pretty soon everybody speaks English.

Wow, that's amazing (and I agree with Cav on your comment on America); it reminds me of my family, who created a new language rather than choosing one in which to converse. I think that it's pretty cool, and if they keep up the Lithuanian, they'll certainly always have the ability to go into interpretation!

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Shajahan wrote:

I read, write and speak in Tamil which is my mother tongue. Its spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu in India. ....

Small world. I used to work with a guy who spoke Tamil. He was from near Madras (I know that's not the name of that city, but the name escapes me at present). I sat next to him at work for a few months and it was always fascinating to hear him on the phone (I wasn't eavesdropping. Okay, maybe a little bit). Every now and then, an English word would creep in. Since we were doing Quality Assurance testing on an Oracle database, the English drop-ins were usually database, Oracle or SQL.

I miss Sekar. Confused

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Cool.

The grammar of Tamil is very similar to Japanese. You just have to learn all the new words! I'm also a big fan of the script.

I worked on a database project this past summer compiling English syllables (don't ask!) and there was a lady doing a spoken Tamil database project sitting across the aisle.

People call this phone number and get connected with someone they don't know who also speaks Tamil, and they're supposed to have a 10-minute conversation and get paid $10 each. This lady's job was to listen to the conversations, and transcribe, tag and annotate it all. She said people would get their friends to call in and they would just gossip about affairs, etc.

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What's the most exotic language you speak or have studied?

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