Well, I'm not sure... Some English words were borrowed from foreign languages, notably French, which has it's own unique and different pronounciation that frequently devoicing the "s".

One thing to remember is most European languages come from Latin, so their all cousins, really

How very lucky I am, not to be part of that big family

@Leelah: Finnish ain't of Latin origin? Why lucky?

Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language. And lucky, because we have grammatical cases AND unofficial prepositions and postpositions (in spoken language)

Too lazy to write about Finno-Ugric languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages

But this is the most interesting part:

"Proto-Finno-Ugric is the reconstructed protolanguage for the Finno-Ugric languages, that is the ancestor of the Finnic languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and Karelian, and the Ugric languages, whose best known example is Hungarian. The parent language is Proto-Uralic, from which Proto-Finno-Ugric and Proto-Samoyedic had split. However, this classification is not without problems; Proto-Finno-Ugric may also be interpreted as a geographical grouping of Proto-Uralic dialects, because the differences are few. It has been suggested that the area where Proto-Finno-Ugric was spoken reached between the Baltic Sea and the Ural mountains.

The Saami languages belong to the Finno-Ugric family of languages. They can be traced back to a Finnic-Saami protolanguage, which is called Early-Proto-Finnic."

And it's funny, that Hungary is located so far away. Other types of language are quite tightly located even though they extend so far behind the Russian border.

Quote:

In French, you don't pronounce consonents at the end of a word. Consonents in the middle of a word generally gets pronounced, but their words are very fluid, and some sounds and sylables run together, so it sounds like they're not pronouncing certain letters. There are of course exceptions to every rule.

And I'm quite sure the only reason the "s" is in Island is because some Royalty made a mistake. We were told about it in English class in high school. After a spelling test no less.

Oh thanks for the clarification. It does help, really!

Hey if ther's any one out there who can speak French and English post me!

me i know how to speak english ^_^

i only can speak English sorry

I suspect she's only after people who can speak French AND English. Posting that you can only speak one is not going to be really helpful (we all assume that everyone here can speak English), but might get her hopes up only to let her down

oh so you mean she cant understand much english?
^_^

lol - no. I don't know why she's asking. Since she hasn't said why she wants to know, I'm assuming she's after someone to translate (perhaps the game she's making?)

Well there are loads of French people here, hope someone will see this thread XD

MysticLayla, do you want someone to translate GoN from english in French for you?

Hello all!

So great to notice that here in Amaranthia people are from all around the world! And that so many speaks or understands more than just one language.

I'm from Finland also. No need to for history lesson or giving examples 'cause Leelah is doing a great job with it! Keep up the good work!
I live near Turku city (Åbo in Swedish) and according to all other Finnish, i happen to have the weirdest dialect of them all! hehe.. What you think, Leelah and Mae?

So i speak naturally Finnish, English, Swedish (not all as well as English), a little German and even less French. (The teacher was too weird so i hadn't enough motivation to attend the lessons)

I'm very interested in languages in general. I had one course of Spanish and i would love to continue learning it one fine day.

I admit i didn't read all the posts here so i'm not sure if someone already pointed out one language that i (and i think many of you are too) very interested: sign language. It's shame that all the countries have a sign language of their own instead of one universal.

Any thoughts?

@Lil'Mimi

Oh, a Finn! I think most difficult dialects to understand are from Rauma and Northern Savonia And I cannot understand some ppl in the capital area because of their weird multilingual source of the dialect.

I must ask, do ppl use double negatives where you live? Because I hear all the time "ilman tekemättä (=without doing nothing)". That's the most stupid way imo to mix grammatical cases and prepositions.

@Leelah

Sometimes you hear people say so, (ilman tekemättä) but not so often anymore. If someone uses double negatives we understand what he/she means but we do know that it's wrong way to say it..

@Lil'Mimi

Of course we understand, but for me it's always sound weird and now my boyfriend always says so only to drive me crazy I hear that a lot here on Southeastern coast from ppl.

You hear a lot of double negatives in everyday English speaking, as well ("I'm not doing nothing", etc.). You know what they are really trying to say, but grammatically, it's completely wrong.