some languages more beautiful than others?

S.P.Q.R   Fri Mar 17, 2006 8:18 pm GMT
Greg:
In theory latin can do just good without preposition, because the 6 cases can express almost any complement.
greg   Fri Mar 17, 2006 10:46 pm GMT
Tu n'as toujours pas prouvé que la latin se passait de prépositions.
Octavian   Sat Mar 18, 2006 5:27 am GMT
This is a matter of personal opinion. To me latin and the romance languages don't sound beautiful because of the way they sound, rather because they are trully noble languages (I do not mean this as a comliment I trully mean noble). It is much easier to explain something in a romance language, the masculine and feminine (and neuter in one romance language) creates a more emotional aura when speaking because there are more cases than in english. English on the other hand is too plain, you will never refer to a stranger as "your highness" ("vous" in French), you can only refer to the person by saying:"you". Thus English is a very simple and vulgar language which restricts you from expressing nobility or chivalry and in some cases emotion. The romance languages and latin are much more complex or advanced then any other European language. The Roman civilization is not only well reflected by its ability to organize and built monuments, aquaducts and professional armies, but also by its "superior" advanced and complex language. Maybe they were able to flourish because of it?

Octavian.
Sorin   Sat Mar 18, 2006 5:51 am GMT
Romanian is the best, because it's still being modified to "reflect"
Classical latin.
greg   Sat Mar 18, 2006 11:40 am GMT
Lui Zalot : « It's awkward how Latin was (use to) the "lingua franca" of europe or most of it. Thus, the civilized world. Now it still survives thru the neo=latin tongues and thru science and American English etc. »

La verve lyrique qui t'envahit te fait oublier de mentionner l'ancien français, le moyen français et le français, Luis Zalot. La première langue vernaculaire à brutalement bousculer le statut quasi-universel du médiolatin en Europe fut l'ancien français sauf — ironie du sort — en France où le médiolatin était vénéré, au moins dans les universités et l'établissement de la loi.

L'explosion littéraire du moyen-âge a consacré l'épanouissement de l'ancien occitan et de l'ancien français, dans tous les domaines. Ces deux langues étaient utilisé à l'international. Le développement de l'ancien français dans les Îles britanniques, en Flandres, en Italie du Nord, dans certaines parties du Saint-Empire et au Levant en est une illustration.

C'est le moyen français tardif qui a remplacé le médiolatin (et l'occitan) dans tous les écrits officiels en France à partir du XVIe siècle.

Puis c'est le français classique qui fut le premier vernaculaire de communication internationale à s'imposer en Europe avant que ce statut soit repris par l'anglais des États-Unis au XXe siècle.
Are   Sat Mar 18, 2006 12:19 pm GMT
i think swedish and norwegian are very beautiful languages to listen to. They have a very melodic sound. But some norwegian and swedish dialects use english "r". That does not sound as beautiful i think.

Russian can also be amusing to listen to:)
augustin717   Sat Mar 18, 2006 4:33 pm GMT
No other language I am aware of, comes even close to the beauty of Russian, when it comes to listening to or telling fairy tales.
Civis Romanus sum   Sat Mar 18, 2006 4:36 pm GMT
Latin & prepositions:

Totally agree with S.P.Q.R and his counterexamples.
In any case I do not like absolute sentence: I think we can say that
Latin is largely able to work without prepositions. Prepositions exists as values added, important values added indeed.
kendra   Sun Mar 19, 2006 11:33 am GMT
I love greek and love greek food
JR   Tue Mar 21, 2006 2:54 am GMT
Greek and Latin are very similar. Even the Romance Languages are related to Greek in some way. I have noticed many cognates between Spanish and Greek especially. The Latin US to O in Spanish makes the OS in Greek easily recognizable and understandable.
Jr   Tue Mar 21, 2006 3:13 am GMT
JR; you have some truth in your observation.

Ancient greek; Manios
Archaic latin; Manios
Classical latin; Manius
Vulgar latin; Maniu(s)
Italian; Manio
Spanish; Manio(s)

Also, a vast majority of spanish words are of "greek" decent.

Homologo
estomago
magia
poema/poeta
etc.

Even, some surnames in spanish HAVE similarity with "greek" and "spanish" After all, Latin comes from Estruscan & Greek etc.
greg   Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:43 am GMT
Jr : même les langues germaniques sont apparentées au grec puisque toutes font partie de la famille indo-européenne. Dans le cas de la langue française, la proximité des lexiques (et les emprunts massifs au grec depuis la nuit des temps) a contribué au développement de la légende de la grécité de la langue de Molière.
Ghuji_Ghujo   Tue Mar 21, 2006 3:10 pm GMT
After all, the majority of you guys have an European background (in the scence of which kind of languages you talk, know or listen to). Thus you miss a large but interesting part of this world's languages.

Even if everybody is telling his/her personal opinion, we could run some statistical methods over all opinions (if the participating persons know (nearly) all languages and are uniformly distributed in the scence of which kind of languages they talk). But why sould we? I learn my favorite languages, you yours.

OK, I like Latin languages and here Italian most.
Also African languages sound very very nice to me (I never asked for names, but I guess Swahili-like)
For me English sounds nicest, spoken with Hindi-accent (non the less I like the southern US accent of all native accents).
I am native German speaker, I like German literature pretty much, but dont think German ever wins this ranking ;)

Peace,
Ghuji
JR   Sat Mar 25, 2006 1:49 am GMT
Since we're all sharing our favorite languages,

My favorite slavic language is Russian. I love the way the Rs are thrilled.
My favorite Germanic language is... German. The gutteral R sounds good to me too.
My favorite Romance languages are Spanish, Italian and French. Spanish and Italian tie for first, while French is a close second.
And among other languages, I'm very fond of Arabic and Chinese, my favorite non-IndoEuropean tounges.
Rita   Mon Mar 27, 2006 5:43 pm GMT
My favorite Romance languages are French and Brazilian Portuguese. I like it nasal.