Re: On Topic Wednesday: Universal Synthetic Languages

"David Tate" <dtate@xxxxxxx> writes:

Peter Bruells wrote:

Blech. I really, really, really hate French. Possible the worst
sounding language on Earth apart from Bavarian.

This says more about you than it does about French, I think.

Sure. However, since I don't actually have anything against France and
do like he sound of Italian and Spain, but also the sound of Japanese
and Bushmen language, I'm inclined to believe that I just have weird
preferences instead of prejudices.

*) Why French by the way? Where I live, there's hardly a French to
see, but we do have a goodly number of Dutch and Frisians around,
even though the latter are being poilte enough to learn Standard
High German.


It depends on how much relative weight you give to the two reasons
for learning second languages -- namely, to be able to converse with
people you otherwise couldn't converse with, and to read the
literature of other cultures. The primary argument in favor of
French is to be able to read its literature, especially if your
native tongue is one that is a common second language. Current
political clout notwithstanding, there is much more literature of
note in French than in Dutch (much less Frisian).

Yes, but not notably more than in a couple of other major languages,
like Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Arabian or Hindi.

Just with English and German alone I could spend my lifetime - several
lifetimes, in fact - reading insightful and well-written
books. Choosing French instead of Dutch mught raise the quantity by 10
instead of 2, but the quality would still raise by 1. OTOH, when I
drive for an hour I could converse with the locals, use their shops,
help them when they come over to our city to shop, etc. While it's
very, very unlikely that I'll ever need French in such a casual
manner. It isn't one of the regions of the world I'm intersted in,
even though it *does* habe better weather than the rest of "Southern"
Europe.
.

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