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Ever Wanted to Learn a "Niche" Language?

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Ancient Egyptian or Babylonian. Only problem with Egyptian is that you wouldn't be able to speak it since like Hebrew, they only wrote in consonants.
 
Something native to northern Europe, like Dutch. I can't be bothered to learn a language where it isn't spoken though, I'd need to move there first.
 
zinfamous said:
Oh shit, I actually forgot that I could speak Italian for ~1 year. 😀
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I rely on the wife for Italian and French.

She has never been really fluent in either, but she grew up in an Italian family in NY and knows quite a bit, I've picked up some over time that way.

She can usually get the gist of a conversation at least.
 
Leyawiin said:
I'm talking about a relatively small language primarily spoken in one or two countries.
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If it were humanly possible, I'd quite seriously love to be able to speak every human language there is (not to mention non-human "languages", though even in my wildest fantasies, I like to remain at least vaguely realistic.😉) While I wouldn't give an eye or my right arm to be able to do it, it would probably be my first of 3 wishes if I ever ran into a lamp-dwelling djinn.😀

But on a slightly more serious note, I've been fascinated by language and languages since I was old enough to understand what they are. (Which was quite young, since mother was 1st generation Greek-American and also spoke a smattering of a couple of others, my father's family were/are Orthodox-ish Jews (who spoke English day-to-day, but of course there'd been Yiddish in the not-distant past, and Hebrew for liturgical purposes, and growing up in NYC, I was obviously in a position to notice that lots of people spoke lots of different languages on a daily basis.) Fortunately given my interest, or maybe one of the reasons for it, I've always been good at them, though of course it does get harder to learn new ones as one gets older, whether one likes it or not...🙁

My one fairly serious regret, language-wise, is that some of them rely on sounds that are all but impossible to learn after young childhood (at least learn really "properly"), for physical reasons rather than simply neurological wiring, like the South African "click languages' " truly unique glottal stops...

Second in the "fantasy list" (mostly due to lack of time, I know it's very unlikely ever to happen) would be Finnish, which like a couple of other modern European languages (eg, Basque, Hungarian) has no known relatives (living or dead) and has a very, very unusual linguistic structure.

I've always wanted to learn Afrikaans:
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By all means, but I've known a couple of South Africans fairly well and, to my ear anyway, it's really nothing special. To me it just sounds like Yet Another Anglo-Saxon language... more specifically, almost exactly like the Dutch it sprang from, only a tad lighter on the gutterals. There are a couple of basic grammatical differences, but otherwise it didn't change all that much from the original, linguistically-speaking...

Runner up would be one of the Scandinavian languages like Danish or Norwegian.
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Again, by all means. I don't personally have a great interest in them, but I will offer my opinion, for what it's worth, that Swedish has always struck me as the easiest of 'em for native English speaker to learn, at least to read and write. At least once you've learned how the letters are pronounced and so can sound it out in your head, if not out loud. At first glance, it doesn't look much like it, but sounded out on a word-by-word basis, it's surprisingly English-like...
 
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Ruptga said:
Something native to northern Europe, like Dutch. I can't be bothered to learn a language where it isn't spoken though, I'd need to move there first.
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Dutch is what I'd pick too, mainly because there is so much video content available with Dutch subs that it would be easy to practice whenever you wanted and still have fun.

Of course there is still the issue of whether or not Dutch is real like say German or fictional like elvish. :sneaky:
 
Does an English dialect/ creole language count? Because Trinidadian creole is my native tongue. 😀
 
Java?

I did learn MIPS assembly...

Oh yea, spoken languages. Always thought picking up one of the Mayan dialects and learning to read the glyphic system would be cool.
 
Does Korean count?

I wanted to learn that to get a job teaching English there... but effectively making minimum wage back home and having to put up with people who have me by the balls (visa, language, laws of foreign country, etc.) didn't keep their appeal.
 
AznAnarchy99 said:
Yeah I lived in Italy for about a year and was relatively fluent by the end. Then came back to US and forgot all of it. Can barely put together a sentence now.

Same with French. Studied it for 5 years, was fluent when I was staying in Paris, now I don't remember a thing.
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languages can be easy to pick up in the right environment...but so so easy to lose. 🙁 One of those things that, thinking back and presently, should be more "enforced" by general human endeavor.

It's a phenomenal human tool, when you think about it. Keeps that brain limber, plus benefits.

MongGrel said:
I rely on the wife for Italian and French.

She has never been really fluent in either, but she grew up in an Italian family in NY and knows quite a bit, I've picked up some over time that way.

She can usually get the gist of a conversation at least.
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That's good to hear. As long as there are always speakers around that want, and even best: depend on the language, it really helps.

Good thing about Italian, Portuguese and to a smaller degree, French, is that command of any those gives you a decent handle into Spanish.
:thumbsup:

Useful in the US and West...but garbage in the opposite hemisphere. :\ 😀
 
AznAnarchy99 said:
French too unless I go to Quebec or Haiti
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French really won't do you much good on a daily basis in Haiti. Only the more/most educated, "upper class" Haitians speak it at all, and many of even them don't speak it in ordinary conversation. And given local history there, a lot of Haitians that don't fit the above categories tend to pretend to not understand French at all unless they absolutely need to, even when they can in fact do so, at least to some extent...

Haitian creole, on the other hand, fits the OP's bill pretty neatly. There's a rather small population (as national populations go) of native speakers entirely in one country and elsewhere it's basically never spoken by anyone who isn't from there or speaking to someone who is... Intellectually speaking, it's a pretty cool language too, though imx, rather hard to learn on one's own (and there's very little instructional info out there, on the web anyway.) And ironically, imx anyway, knowing French actually tends to get in the way. My language-related mind tries to interpret it as a sort of simple variant of French, but it's actually much more linguistically complex than that... When you parse it out carefully, you can readily see the connections to French, but if you try to interpret even individual words much less sentences from a "French perspective", you get nowhere fast.
 
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I should admit that I have had ~10 year's+ in-house access to one of the few remaining European niche, and truly Old-world (close branch from Sanskrit, actually) languages, in that my special lady friend is Latvian.

After a decade and ~2 week's homeland travel some years ago, I can now effectively order beer in public, certain foods spiced with dill, and thank anyone for their services. This ~3 million individuals' spoken language ain't dying with this Yank, that's for sure.

:thumbsup:
 
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