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Easiest language for an English speaker?

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
80 messages over 10 pages: 13 4 5 6 7 ... 2 ... 9 10 Next >>
prz_
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Poland
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 Message 9 of 80
01 June 2012 at 8:10pm | IP Logged 
Scots?
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clumsy
Octoglot
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Poland
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 Message 10 of 80
01 June 2012 at 8:26pm | IP Logged 
I would tap for Tok Pisin and Bislama.

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tractor
Tetraglot
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 Message 11 of 80
01 June 2012 at 8:53pm | IP Logged 
Scots, Afrikaans, Dutch, Frisian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, HTML, CSS, AppleScript.
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espejismo
Diglot
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Russian Federation
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 Message 12 of 80
01 June 2012 at 9:07pm | IP Logged 
As an English speaker, I find Ukrainian to be very intuitive.
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beano
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 Message 13 of 80
01 June 2012 at 10:00pm | IP Logged 
prz_ wrote:
Scots?


Is Scots classed as a language in it's own right? I'm a Scotsman but I would say that most people here speak a version of Scottish-English, not the auld Scots the likes of Rabbie Burns wrote in. We do have a lot of Scots words still in everyday use but some are dying out. I think back to the vocabulary my granny used, words I know the meaning of, but I don't hear them spoken often by young people.
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tractor
Tetraglot
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Norway
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 Message 14 of 80
01 June 2012 at 10:09pm | IP Logged 
beano wrote:
Is Scots classed as a language in it's own right?

Depends on who you ask.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
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COF
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United States
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 Message 15 of 80
01 June 2012 at 10:17pm | IP Logged 
tractor wrote:
beano wrote:
Is Scots classed as a language in it's own right?

Depends on who you ask.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language


Only SNP supporting, highly nationalistic types think Scots is its own language. Such ideas tend to be rooted in anti-English sentiment and a desire to appear as distict from England as possible.

The truth is, no one really speaks Scots in every day life, it is a very archaic dialect and some would argue it was only ever really used in a poetic sense, not in every day speech.

Scots is no more its own language than broad Cockney is.

Edited by COF on 01 June 2012 at 10:19pm

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beano
Diglot
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 Message 16 of 80
01 June 2012 at 10:33pm | IP Logged 
COF wrote:
tractor wrote:
beano wrote:
Is Scots classed as a language in it's own right?

Depends on who you ask.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language


Only SNP supporting, highly nationalistic types think Scots is its own language. Such ideas tend to be rooted in anti-English sentiment and a desire to appear as distict from England as possible.

The truth is, no one really speaks Scots in every day life, it is a very archaic dialect and some would argue it was only ever really used in a poetic sense, not in every day speech.

Scots is no more its own language than broad Cockney is.


There are many verbs, nouns and adjectives unique to Scotland. They are all placed in broadly the same grammatical framework as English but the further back you go, the stronger and more distinct the dialect/language. Danish and Swedish are classed as different languages yet a lot of mutual comprehension exists. Ditto Serbian and Croatian. I guess the existence of separate political identity helps validate the classification of these languages.

Even today, Scots people rarely use the English concepts "shall" and "ought" - preferring "will" and "should" respectively. "Should have went...." is also frequently heard and that sounds natural to me, although I know the grammar book says "gone" is more appropriate here. Maybe all this is just an example of a dialect at work but Scots is certainly a more impenetrable dialect than Cockney.


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