Which language do you speak?

[DarkGizmo]

I'm just curious, i'm from Québec and I'm french and I know there is some french around so I was wondering what do you guyz/gals speak at home.

[Ramsus]

I hear they parler a different sort of French up there.

I speak American English, sans any particular regional accent or colloquialisms. I've noticed the site has gotten a bit more International since it first started though.

[Salvadeiro]

I feel so dirty and left out clicking "Other"

Well as you should know, I'm this message boards only Portuguese speaking person (as far as I know anyway)  So alguem que fala portugues, fala comigo

VIVA PORTUGAL E BENFICA

[Daniel Krispin]

Know: English, and a scarce amound of German (depreciated from near perfect knowledge in my childhood)

Would like to know: Latin, and Classical Greek - then I could read the Iliad in its original form.

[Hadriel]

I speak several dialects of English, ranging from American English to actual English to Ebonics.  I speak Spanish badly, and I know a few words of Yuuzhan Vong and Klingon.  I use them to bruk tukken nom canbin-tu.

[Salvadeiro]

I have such an accent that some of my non-portuguese friends make fun of me for lol, instead of pronouncing stuff beginning with 'h' i leave it alone because its always silent in portuguese.

[YbrikMetaknight]

English is the only language in which I am fluent, and as a writer and an editor, I consider my ability to use English proficiently to be my most valuable skill. I also know a little Spanish and a little Italian. My Italian is better than my Spanish because I've studied it much more recently.

[Salvadeiro]

One thing I have to say about myself is I learn languages quick.  Knowing one Romance language opens up the basics to most of them (minus the far eastern ones...Romanian to be exact.)   Portuguese, is almost like Spanish (I hate when I post something in Portuguese and people are like "No Hablo Espanol" it's its own language, different from Spanish.) but not quite.  Portuguese is more complex in its own way, like French and Italian.

[Daniel Krispin]

No one else but me has any desire to learn ancient Greek, eh?

[Radical_Dreamer]

No one else but me has any desire to learn ancient Greek, eh?

Does it have vowels? Ancient Hebrew exhausted my patience for vowel-less alphabets.

[Daniel Krispin]

No one else but me has any desire to learn ancient Greek, eh?

Does it have vowels? Ancient Hebrew exhausted my patience for vowel-less alphabets.

Yes, most certainly! In fact, it was they who first pioneered the use of vowels. You see, the Phoenicians had an alphabet and, throught trading and various means, it came to the Hellenic/Greek peoples. Now, the Phoenician alphabet was as those before: no vowels. Yet when the Greeks adopted it, they found they had excess letters, and put those into use as vowels. In the end, they came up with an alphabet not unlike our own, and, in fact, alphabet comes from the first two letters: Alpha and Beta. The whole alphabet is so uppercase (? for ones not able to be done with Latin script, the name and our equivalent in brackets):
A (Alpha=A),
B (Beta=B),
? (Gamma=C),
? (Delta=D),
E (Epsilon=short E),
Z (Zeta=ts, or a short Z),  
H (Eta=long E),
? (Theta=TH),
I (Iota=I)
K (Kappa=K)
? (Lambda=L)
M (Mu=M)
N (Nu=N)
? (Xi=X)
O (Omicron=short O, like the u in but)
? (Pi=P)
P (Rho=R)
? (Sigma=S)
T (Tau=T)
Y (Upsulon=U)
? (Phi=PH, FH)
X (Chi=KH)
? (Psi=PS)
? (Omega=long O)

As you can see, not only are many of the letters the same, there are a superflous number of vowels, more than in English (7 as opposed to 5!)

[Chrono'99]

Is it true you can understand modern Greek once you learnt ancient Greek? What would be the differences then?

[SilentMartyr]

English for me, but I took 6 years of Spanish in middle/high school. It was hard to learn anything though, we had 14 teachers over that 6 year span.

[Daniel Krispin]

Is it true you can understand modern Greek once you learnt ancient Greek? What would be the differences then?

I'm not sure. I think, though don't quote me on this, that the words are relatively the same, although pronounciation is different (yet I find that strange: English changed so greatly in 1000 years that we cannot now recognize its form as it was spoken during the time of Hastings, how much more should Greek have in 2000!) But as I said, it is for certain, at least, that some of the pronounciation has changed. If nothing else, my father's friend who is an ancient Greek instructor has said that the Greek speaking people have difficulty in his classes, I suppose because it is too similar, and it is difficult to change it just that bit.

Anyway, though, to me the interest is in the ancient form. Currently I know about two dozen words (the, and, sword, sickle, lord, king, soul, breath, god, for, on the other hand, to be, and various word that have found their way into english, like around (peri), beside (para), etc.... and I don't know any of the grammar, conjugations, declensions, or sentence structure.), so if I ever learn it, I will have a way to go.

[YbrikMetaknight]

I really love learning languages. I'm not really done with Italian (though I'm not taking any more Italian classes at TCU), since I want to someday be at least conversational in that language. I'd like to brush up on my Spanish at some point. I'd like to learn French. And I'd really love to learn Portuguese. I could take a beginning Portuguese class next semester, but it's at a really bad time for me.