Ambrose Nankivell [email hidden] opined the following...
Quoted message said:Western Europe's mainly Latin and Germanic (The Scandinavian family
being one form of Germanic (and, some have said, they're all
essentially the same language)). There are exceptions, found mainly in
the British Isles and Iberian peninsula.
OK. Got that one wrong then. I've never really studied any of the
Scandinavian languages other than to register that they seem to have
some odd characters! :-)
Quoted message said:Further east, there's the Slavic family and Greek. All the above,
except Basque are Indo-European.
Despite knowing better I was grouping Slavic and Germanic. ISTR that
there was some commonality at one point but that's probably a major
misunderstanding on my part. I remember a Russian speaking friend
claiming that it was easier to learn if you had German reasonably sorted
(She holds an ecomonics degree from a German university so could be said
to have it "reasonably sorted"!).
Quoted message said:In addition, there's Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish as you get further
east, plus the Semitic languages when you get to the Middle east.
I'd never really thought of Turkish as European, but fair enough.
Quoted message said:Remember of course that the stress isn't marked on real life Russian,
so there's some pronunciation which isn't marked in the spelling.
Except that the stress is generally at the end of the word unless it was
stolen from another language. And that you can pronounce the words
unstressed and while you'll stand out in a crowd, you won't be wrong.
What I liked was the lack of diphthongs or silent characters. Read every
letter and you've pretty much got it.
That said I had major problems with the "R" sound, since I learnt to
roll my Rs as the French do, and Russian has a different sound (Front of
the tongue, not the back apparently). The nearest I got to doing it
properly was lisping. The Russians can hear the difference much better
than I can.
Quoted message said:Spanish and Italian are also pronounced more or less as written. Part
of it's due to the fact that the alphabet was invented for more or
less the same language, as was the Russian,
Depressingly, that had never occurred to me. Kind of obvious when you
think about it!
Quoted message said:but also it's because they
tend to say a lot of simple syllables quite fast, as opposed to
English's complex syllables said slowly.
Fast? Definately. My first full encounter with Italian was the guard on
the train who (we worked out afterwards) was explaining that we needed
to validate our tickets before boarding. When he finished (Ignoring our
pleas of "non parlo Italiano"😉 a woman in the next vestibule started on
at us as well. We received a tirade of about 2 minutes duration in which
time we looked bewildered, before she tired of us and went away. It came
as something of a surprise to us that we managed to grasp enough Italian
after 2 weeks to survive, when we had that introduction to the country.
Quoted message said:I'd have thought so. I find it impossible to learn a language without
a reason. I should have made more effort when I went to Korea
though. Hardly even learnt the alphabet.
This was the problem with Russian. While it was interesting, it was also
expensive (Private tuition!) and the reason for learning it (A rather
cool artist who was married to my mate's cousing) upped sticks and
returned to Russia. Since I know only two other Russians, one of whom
used to teach me, and the other who is a researcher at the University
(Where I haven't worked for 2 years) it seemed pointless to continue.
Jon
