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Most "precise" language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4637 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 2 of 19 23 April 2013 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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German is quite precise. The word order, the genders determining a case, & all of the compound words is rather extraordinary.
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| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 19 23 April 2013 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | ||
Is word order your only criterion for preciseness? I would argue that preciseness can be defined many ways. How about completeness of case use with freedom of word order? How about a language that for the most part disregards adjectives and uses preverbs and verb affixes to describe something, yet lets word order be relatively free? R. == 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 5 of 19 23 April 2013 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think any language is more precise than the other, so the question (if there was any, for you seem to have made up your answer already) is rather pointless.
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| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 6 of 19 23 April 2013 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||
Emphasis is mine. And there you go. Preciseness is subjective, which was what my point was. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 19 23 April 2013 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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<moderator hat on>
EuroLanguage: You've defined "preciseness" according to a private aesthetic metric, which is fine—we all have aesthetic opinions about languages. But do we really want to create a 10-page thread debating the definition of "precise", and arguing whether or not an intricate case system meets that definition? Obviously some people are going to say "yes", other people are going to say "no", and nobody is going to change anybody else's mind, because nobody has the foggiest idea what "precise" means in this context. This seems like the kind of discussion that's going to go downhill, and indeed, I've already had to delete some gratuitous personal insults from this thread. Personally, when discussing matters of aesthetic taste, I find it helps to try to understand other people's opinions, and try to learn how they see things, rather than to try to assert my own opinions as authoritative. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 19 24 April 2013 at 12:59am | IP Logged | ||
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For me Finnish is very precise. ♥ For example, I love how you don't have to learn words like where (essentially what's tabelvortoj in Esperanto), you just put the word mikä (what) in the needed case (what-in). This way you can form some question words which aren't used in other languages.
Someone might call the lack of genders imprecise, especially when it comes to personal pronouns (there are no separate words for he/she - on the other hand, there's no need for the cumbersome structures that I have to resort to in English just to be nice to my own gender!) 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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