The most difficult Indoeuropean languages...

a.p.a.m.   Tue Mar 06, 2007 2:22 pm GMT
Franco, may you and your stupid faggot kid die a brutal, horrible death. And after that, may you both spend eternity in the lake of fire.
Franco   Wed Mar 07, 2007 3:41 am GMT
The Lake of Fire! That may sound like a bad thing to you but you must take into consideration cultural connotations. For me Fire is a wonderful thing for which all must strive, therefore I feel pulled at to the Lake of Fire with glee. Thank you for your wishing us to go to this wonderful lake, it'll be great. Though I am disgruntled by the first line, but I'll let that slip because I am a kind man and I understand your psych.
Emilka   Wed Mar 14, 2007 2:14 pm GMT
I heard that Polish is one of the most difficult languages... let me check you... :>

Gdzie sie uczyles polskiego? Zabawne, poniewaz malo obcokrajowcow zna ten jezyk, chyba, ze jestes Polakiem i cwaniaka zgrywasz, ze znasz ten jezyk :)
Guest   Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:52 pm GMT
The most difficult is indian
Franco   Thu Mar 15, 2007 2:36 am GMT
<<The most difficult is indian>>

¡Quite!

Yes, I find Indian to be very difficult too, but it must be learnt as there are a billion native speakers.
Adam   Wed Mar 21, 2007 1:49 pm GMT
Well the celtic tongues do have a completely different word order than most other indo-european tongues.
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Welsh, the most-spoken British language after English, seems to be difficult.

It's spoken by 750,000 people in Wales (a quarter of the Welsh population) and 133,000 people in England. It's native to both Wales AND England as it was spoken in what is now England before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.

It has what is called "Soft Mutation" in which the spelling of nouns changes according to how it's used in the sentence. The first letters or letters of the word changes. Here's the key -

C becomes G

P becomes B

T becomes D

G disappears

B becomes F

D becomed DD

M becomes F

These words change if you put words such as "The" or "My" or "From" or "To" in front of them. e.g (using the examples above)

Cat - Cath
The cat - Y gath

Port - Porth
The port - Y borth

Fair - Teg
The fair - Y deg

Garden - Gardd
The garden - Yr ardd

Morning - Bore
The morning - Y fore

Meadow - Dol
The meadow - Y ddol

Girl - Merch
The girl - Y ferch

But all these are only for "THE". If you want to say "MY garden" or "MY port" then all the rules are different.

For example -

Stone - Carreg
The stone - Y garreg
My stone - Fy ngharreg

But that's only for words beginning with G that "ngh" is added for words after "my". For others the spelling is different again.

Welsh placenames are also affected -

Bangor
"From Bangor" - "Ym Mangor".

Cardiff - Caerdydd
"From Cardiff" - "Yng Nghaerdydd"
Adam   Wed Mar 21, 2007 8:02 pm GMT
In fact, this is the same of all the Celtic languages.

Here's the same in Irish -

Pen - Peann
The pen - An pheann

House - Teach
The House - An theach

Head - Cean
The head -An cheann
Riadach   Thu Mar 22, 2007 2:54 pm GMT
Not to be a pedant but all those words are masculine so they don't lenite after an.

However

feminine words

páirt- an pháirt

(t never lenites after n, dentals rule)


cúirt-an chúirt

then there is eclipses which is quite close to the welsh example

páirc- ar an bpáirc

carr- ar an gcarr

teach- a dteach

bóthar- ar an mbóthar

deartháir- a ndeartháir

now that's eclipses and lenition, you don't even want me to get into the genitive case.
Right?   Fri Mar 23, 2007 2:06 am GMT
The most difficult language is the one you don't know!
Franco   Fri Mar 23, 2007 7:49 am GMT
Right,

What a failed attempt to be funny!
Right?   Fri Mar 23, 2007 3:09 pm GMT
The funny part is that I got some reaction :-)

It's so funny to become the object of a joke...ahhhhh...what a relief...
Mawami   Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:00 am GMT
I have tried to learn (with variyng degree of success) the following IE languages: Hittite, Sanscrit, Avesta, Old Persian, Old Greek, Latin, Old Irish, Old English, German, Russian, Spanish, and I speak English, Czech and Slovak and can read a couple more languages, such as French Italian or Polish. Judging from this, I must agree that the greatest sucker of them all is Old Irish - i.e. Celtic. There are several reasons: 1) verbal system is as complex as that of Sanscrit or Greek, but the relation within paradigms are far more obscure, also a unique novelty among IE languages, the difference of absolute and conjunct forms, the ways pronominal words get incorporated in the verb, and syntactic lenition make it very difficult to remember, recognise and reproduce each form, 2) Old Irish has possibly the greatest number of consonant phonemes in any IE language, incl. Hindi and Russian 3) it keeps nominal cases and dual forms 4) the ortography is just crazy, that means you can never know whether you're dealing with a diphtong or a "slender" consonant 5) it is frought with typological anomalies that cannot be found elsewhere in IE (save for Old Welsh, maybe) 6) many nominal relations are expressed through strange construction using prepositions, prepositions are also conjugated, such as dom means "to me" 7) word order is kind of unusual too - Verb Subject Object (unique to Celtic Languages). Old welsh is much easier.

Mawami
PER ALBA   Fri Apr 20, 2007 10:03 pm GMT
AHAHAHAH non ho mai sentito nessuno parlare correttamente l'italiano, anzi!!! Prima di sparare giudizi affrettati apprestati a motivare le tue esternazioni. La grammatica italiana è più complessa e ricca della grammatica francese e spagnola...dubito che tu abbia una reale ideazione di ciò di cui ti proponi di blaterare. Detto tra noi l'albanese è abominevole!!
Shaft   Sun Apr 22, 2007 3:51 pm GMT
Indo-Aryan languages are the most difficult of them all.
superass   Sun Apr 22, 2007 5:39 pm GMT
The most difficult language of all is arse-language