Languages

[BBKing]

English first, of course, but German to a fair standard (spent 18 months over there on and off but learnt most of it in a six-week affair with a German woman who refused to speak English. It's known as the horizontal dictionary principle). Java, perl, php and Visual Basic presumably don't count :P

I'd love to learn Czech having been there a lot - I love the sense of humour and beer over there, although not generally the following morning. I'm still at the 'two beers and an ice cream' stage.

In my family I'm actually a bit of a linguistic dunce as the rest of them all have about four languages each (my grandfather worked at Bletchley Park during the war translating German). There's definitely some kind of genetic predeliction going on there, as they're mostly a direct line on my mother's side, although my Dad is pretty good, he learnt German through my mother. My mother, her sister, her father and my sister all have multiple languages (usually a combination of German, French, Italian, Spanish and Welsh).

Actually, the hardest language to learn is the second, after that you've got two others to compare against and you start to understand why you construct sentences in certain ways and can pick out annoyances (I occasionally want to resort to using the German 'ihr' for addressing multiple groups of friends to make it clear I'm addressing a group not just an individual - in English there isn't an equivalent, apart from saying 'you lot').

[Ramrod]

Originally Posted by Theodoric

I'd say that Latvian like, Sanskrit, has a common ancestor in Indo-European, but not that Latvian descended from Sanskrit. Languages descended from Sanskrit are the modern-day languages of northern India.

I stand corrected for my loose terminology However there is talk of a tribe in northern India who have light skin and blond hair

PS An almost totally irrelevant aside. When I was a young lad, the inhabitants of Latvia were known, in English, as Letts and the corresponding adjective was Lettish. No doubt such irregular names became too confusing and someone decided to regularise them.

We are still known as Letts in parts of Europe, especially Germany.

[Ramrod]

Originally Posted by BBKing

German to a fair standard (spent 18 months over there on and off but learnt most of it in a six-week affair with a German woman who refused to speak English. It's known as the horizontal dictionary principle).

Thats a cunning way to learn the linguistic in's and out's of a foreign language.

Languages

If we class mother tongue as the first language you learn and are exposed to..... then mine would be italian although by the time i started school my mother decided that it would be better for me to be spoken to in english so i didn't feel out of place or suffer any disadvantages....
Things evolved to the point where i've spoken to my family in english and they speak to me in italian, which other people find confusing Works for us
Thanks to the efforts of my mother..... my english language skills were never compromised by having foreign parents
I did my first degree in arabic..... and given that i've not used it for years means that my spoken arabic is pretty awful, and i'd learnt egyptian arabic for conversation purposes and got confused when travelling around other parts of the Arab world. Being able to use french when i couldn't find the words in arabic meant that i now start sentences in arabic and finish them in french But i can still read and write arabic and i don't think i'll ever forget that skill
My french isn't too bad.... helped by my italian..... but ruined by my arabic

So yes..... i am a polyglot..... but i tend to speak all the languages at the same time which makes my knowing any of them more or less redundant