Looks like it is an old discussion in this forum: the date of topics about this are quite old and i can't reply, but now i can bring you my opinion.

Well, english is the first language spoken in the world due to economic reasons, and in the past due to social reasons (british imperialism).
It's good that most people from the world can speak between them in a common language, no matter what it is and why it's declared the "mundial" language.

But, altough english has a relative easy grammar, pronounciation and speech are chaotic and horrible, without rules and "very-fast" sounds.
And, if we take any other language, we'll find more difficulties: in spanish the horrible verb forms and the waves of irregular verbs: Moorish, multiple dialects, difficult writing and difficult pronountiation, too; japanense, well, japanense people don't understand the entire language until the age of 14, etc etc. These are only examples.

Once upon a time, a person made a language with around 10 grammar rules, where you can build words with basic "root words" without exceptions, well-defined and easy verb forms and a very simple and ruled speech: The Esperanto.

All latin languages and all germanic ones, too. It's a mix.

Well, i can say that, in one day, i've learnt the same quantity of Esperanto than 1 week learning english or french.

Se mi povus paroli Esperanto, vi ankau.

Yes, a perfect language in fact. And very powerful . But then let's speak in the C++ dialect, better .

Avenger, that's cheating. This is the real way to speak in C:

short attention_spans()
{
   you_people_have(yes);
   return now || feel_matthews_wrath;
}

Japanese is not as difficult as many thinks. It has a lot of words indeed, but the kanjis are easy to learn once you figure them out and learn to mix them, it has only past and present (future is the -ing form in english), and pronunciation has only a couple of rules

I totally agree with you, CascoMon!

Esperanto estas tre bela kaj tre facila! Where are you leaning it from? I'm using Lernu! And what does the -us ending mean?

Rey: AFAIK, -ing is present progressive, which is used for near future.

Yep, but in japanese it means future. If you are doing something right now, it is present.

Bleh, if you want a language that is basically dead when it comes to inflexions, stick with English, which doesn't even have a (proper) second person singular anymore.

I started to teach myself Czech not too long back and I love it! Three genders (with a distinction between animate and inanimate male nouns), seven cases, modal verbs, four modes... I love it

Ahem!
[EDIT]
Here's some more links for your enjoyment:
[url http://web.archive.org/web/20030811165117/http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/esp.html]
[url http://www.steve.gb.com/rants/esperanto.html]
[url http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5037/Esp.html]
[/EDIT]

Go Finnish! 15 cases! OTOH you can form new words out of old ones:

(fi: ) järjestys
(en: ) order

epäjärjestys
disorder

järjestää
organise

järjestelmä
system

järjestelmällistää
to systemise something

järjestelmällistyttää
to have something systemised by someone else

järjestelmällistämäisyys
the quality to systemise

järjestelmällistyttämäisyys
the quality to have something systemised by someone else

järjestelmällistyttämättömyys
the lack of quality to have something systemised by someone else

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyys
the lack of quality to have something unsystemised by someone else

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellä
with the lack of quality to have something unsystemised by someone else

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsä
with his (or her) lack of quality to have something unsystemised by someone else

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkin
also with his (or her) lack of quality to have something unsystemised by someone else

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkään
neither with his (or her) lack of quality to have something unsystemised by someone else

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänkö
neither with his (or her) lack of quality to have something unsystemised by someone else?

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän
(doubtfully: ) neither with his (or her) lack of quality to have something unsystemised by someone else?

My eyes hurt so much! Spanish is quite easy compared to that.

[edit]

The longest word in Spanish is 'anticonstitucionalmente'. It doesn't compare at all.

epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän
anticonstitucionalmente

It's less than half of the letters!

Did anyone count how long that last word is? I got lost at around 18 or 20...

How do you pronounce that last one?

Just read it aloud

It's easy to pronounce finnish, unless you have jumpy eyes.
It's pronounced exactly as it's written.
Single char is short, double char is long.

And how do those ¨ affect the sound?

How is ä pronounced? What about ö?

I might add that words that long are far too impractical to use. They're more like jokes for natives too.
I'm not very good with explanations, but...

• ä is like the a in "hand", but kept short. (IPA: æ)

• ö is the same as in Swedish and German, but always short. A little like the English sound of ir, as in "dirty birdie", just don't move your tongue to form the r (if you pronounce in American). (IPA: ø)

</li>
[EDIT]

I think I've never seen a word like that.

Yeah Czech is lovely language (good thing is that we have only 3 time clauses, not like English )

I'm using [url http://www.institutoesperanto.com.ar]. It's argentinian but you can see the page in english. It's cool, and they bring you a diploma if you success an exam (i think it's free, i've sent a email to them asking this question).
But i've seen a little lernu! It's very good, it has a "chat" and a forum too.

The us ending means condition. For me, and spanish native speaker, sounds weird at first.

Rash, the first web page you show to us is a bit intolerant. I totally disagree its points of view and its reasons.

For a international language, Esperanto is perfect. Easy, standard, easy verbs and a ruled pronountiation.

That word makes me afraid.

And easer to read it: each character has only one sound (except characters "c", "g" "n" and "l") even with quotes: "e" sounds the same than "è" (but with emphasis).

n and l

There's also "r" that sounds like "rr" if it's at the beginning of a word or after consonant (but at least it has precise rules, not like another language I know of but I won't name ).

Language recognition would be easier if it was done in Spanish .

However, don't forget the IR (to go) verb. My friends had some hard time trying to learn its past (fui), present (voy) and future (iré) And there are too many forms for my taste.

Well, English has around 380 irregular verbs.

But you only have to memorize two extra words/verb (past and past participle). In Spanish you have to remember the full conjugation of 8 (IIRC) simple forms. That's 8x6 = 48 words/verb. Plus gerund (equivalent, more or less, to Engligh -ing form) and past participle.

When ReyBrujo said "fui", he actually meant "fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fuisteis, fueron". And he only mentioned past, preset and future, but that's not all of them.

Just wondering, is Spain the only country where the second person in the plural ("fuisteis") is still used? Here is virtually deprecated; you only use "vosotros" in formal letters, and only as greetings (like "vuestro servidor").

And the subjunctive... shudder

Why not try Lojban instead? Much more logical (some would say too logical) and (virtually) not Eurocentric.

then how do you say it?

Specially the future (Don't ask me the conjugation of any verb on future subjubctive because I wouldn't remember (edit: well, just remembered, it's like the past, but change the 'e' in the termination with an 'a': ellos (they) fueran (past) -> ellos fueren (future))).

Hmm... I think we use usted/ustedes. Instead of saying Mañana caminareis por aqui, we would say Mañana caminaran por aqui. In informal situations Uruguay and Argentina replace usted with vos (like [vos] podes venir mañana?), in formal ones we use usted. Instead of vosotros we use ustedes even in informal speaking, though it is mostly ommited ([ustedes] pueden venir mañana?). And we replaced vuestro with su/suyo, even in formal situations, leaving the vuestro to very formal situations, like writing to an authority, or maybe when looking for a job.

Come on, Japanese rules! If you're choosing a language for the Internet, it has a lot of merit. You know all that tone of voice stuff that gets lost in English? Well, Japanese actually has different words to go with those different tones of voice. So it's a lot easier to avoid misunderstandings in text. And of course it looks pretty (see RB's sig).

But Japanese doesn't use -te iru for the future afaik.

Japanese is an inefficient language. It has too few sounds, meaning you need more time to convey the same amount of information. Remember Mojo Jojo?

Never heard of it. Do enlighten me

Anyway we're talking about the net, right? We've got kanji. They carry loads of information.

Latin is the language. All it needs is some more up-to-date words added to it, and it would rule.

ReyBrujo: it's the opposite here. Usted/ustedes/su is for formal situations. vos is for extremely formal situations (diplomacy, royal family...).

Hehehe, but our vos isn't like your vos. In example, you would say Vos sos Oscar? instead of the more formal Usted es Oscar? or the correct neutral version Tu eres Oscar? (which is not used at all here, it sounds strange). Unless you can use vos as my example there; we are taught down here that vos used in that way is a corrupted spanish form only found in this area.

Yes, we're talking about the same vos. But the formality ladder is just reversed here. Tu eres Oscar? is the informal one, Usted es Oscar? is formal, and Vos sois Oscar is extremelly formal (almost unused now).

Ah. Then the voceísmo (as we call it down here) is not using vos, but removing the terminations of the verbs (sos instead of sois, habes instead of habeis, corrieron instead of corristeis, etc).

My lesson for today

Finnish has only one irregular verb in common use.

And if you want to go formal, just switch to plural and don't omit any omittable words. Done. You are now speaking formally.

Hmmm... looks like an intermediate file from some obscure compiler... me likes obscurities...
The German writer Morgenstern once wrote a speech that is made up out of 2 sentences. The first one is an elaborate greeting. The second one is made up so that the last third of it consists of only auxiliary verbs resolving subordinate phrases. It does technically make sense, but read aloud, it's just blah blah blah können würden gehabt zu haben zu sein zu können zu dürfen wollen gemacht zu haben wagen.

Anyway, I've heard that:
- Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are extremely easy in terms of grammar; pronunciation is somewhat odd at times, but perfectly doable
- Mandarin Chinese has been rated the easiest language in the world by some UN committee. It has no declination, no conjugation, no tenses, no gender; basically, every mode change of any word is achieved by adding extra words. I don't know zip about this, but I found it interesting.
- C is not useful to communicate between humans; it was designed for a very specific mode of communication, and provides little possibilities to use other modes.

And finally: The discussion about which language is most useful as a "world language" is rather futile. Time will tell. I vote for Chinese, though. Not because it's so easy, but because China has an unbelievable economic growth and will probably soon be one of the most important economic powers in the world.

Not necessarily. Less sounds means recognition is easier and can be faster, which in turn makes faster speaking feasible.

But if we change the global language now it'll be hell for future kids to read all the old english material we've produced. I wonder how long it would take to translate everything to the new language.

On the contrary. Imagine a language with only two sounds, say: "la" and "li". The size of words grows quickly as you need to convey more meaning, and the language will consist of words along the lines of "la", "lali", "lilila", "lalilalali" and so on. Now imagine speaking this language quickly; recognition becomes impossible as a flurry of a few almost identical sounds rush by. Having more sounds makes the language easier and faster to understand, in fact; the larger available permutations of sounds a word can consist of makes recognition much, much easier.

n/ñ and l/ll, and yes, I forgot r/rr

Television is Latin, isn't it?

And I will not say more because I lost most of the thread.

Well, one last thing. Oscar: When did you go to bed? 4:30 am????

Yes... ermmm... I was helping the "Magic Kings", yeah, that was it ("Reyes Magos". For non Europe (or maybe just non-Spanish?), it's our equivalent Santa Claus, but they are three instead of just one )

Just non-Spanish. Sounds like the three Magi; Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar.

Yeah, those ones.

Oh , so, why don't you gave to me what I wish, uh?

Essentially, yes. But learning the characters can be painful. Even worse, with simplified Chinese it has become even harder to infer the meaning or pronounciation of a character from its composition. The inflections aren't too hard to learn, as there are only four tones (as opposed to as many as seven in other dialects of Chinese).

IR... very similar to the original latin word IRE, not even Italian uses something similar to it
...
Of course Italian still uses it

I think it's a mishmash of Greek and Latin.
The `tele' is Greek for `far'. Videre is Latin for seeing. Greek would be something like `skopeo', but the word `teleskope' was already taken.

I remember back in elementary school we had these Esperanto organisation people introducing us the Esperanto. They teached us two or four hours of it. Dont remember much about it anymore tho. Only that i would prefer English as the only language around the globe.

'Video' means 'see' (imperative) in latin. Likewise 'Audio' = hear (again, imperative).

I think television is of entirely greek origins.. Unless it originally meant 'spear face'?

edit: fixed.

You can speak Teletubbilala!

Western-andalusians do a strange mix of both forms. For spanish purists it's incorrect: We use "ustedes" instead of "vosotros", but we use verbs with the "ustedes" form. For example, instead of saying "Ustedes van a comer", we said "ustedes vais a comer".

Wrong, wrong and wrong! Where did you learn Spanish?

Spanish and English personal pronouns

spanish         English
  yo               I
  tú              you
  él/ella      he/she/it
  nosotros        we
  vosotros        you
  ellos/ellas    them

vosotros is still using! usted/ustedes is only formal.

The fact is that we, Spanish, don't need personal pronouns to know the verb person since:

      yo voy
      tú vas
      él va
nosotros vamos
vosotros vais
   ellos van

so we have the verb

 voy
 vas
 va
 vamos
 vais
 van

this way "vamos" means exactly the same than "nosotros vamos" and it's much different than "vosotros vais" and so... English needs the personal pronouns because it uses the same word in all persons (except thirth singular person or the verb to be).

I meant, we don't use the second person plural at all. We (all America) don't say vais a comer?, but van a comer?. I believe Spain is the only place where the -eis -ais -ois still is used, that is what I was asking

[Spanish mode]
Vaya, entonces deberíamos de empezar a distinguir entre español y castellano, ¿o no?;)
[/Spanish mode]

[spanish mode]
Para que veas lo rica que es nuestra lengua que se puede darle mil y un usos .
[/spanish]

They (americans) aren't used to use "nosotros" and its associated verb terminations, but it doesn't mean that it isn't exists in our language.
It's like if i have 5 keys, but i only need to open 3 doors.

Yes, but how you call castellano in english, Niunio?

Actually, television is a greek-latin mix afaik.

The greek word is 'thleorash', thle (=away) and orash (=vision). Pronounced: teele - orassee (as in 'tee' + 'lemming' and 'oracle' + 'see').

--
Who is General Protection Fault and why is he reading my drive?

Just found it...8-)

Halmén: that's the best part of Finnish and the Nordic languages - the ability to create infinitely long words
(just a shame people can't spell anymore and destroy the language with sär skrivning )

That's the new name for Loglan, right?

On the topic of pronunciation and sounds, I have to say that the Russians got it right with the alphabet at least - one sound, one letter. If they hadn't fucked it all up with changing the pronunciation of everything according to stress, it would've been one of the world's easiest languages to pronounce

Erm... actually, both are first person singular of the present indicative. The imperative is either vide, audi (singular) or videte, audite (plural).

You are right, of course, my latin-fu is semi-weak and very rusty.

Well who needs Latin anyway. I am happy with english.

Me does. Last time the lecture was that boring that I translated Caesar.

Latin is fun. It also helps to know Latin (and admittedly French) when you're in Italy and don't speak Italian.

And it helps a lot when learning Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, or any other romanic language for that matter.

AFAIK, the term 'Castellano' is used to distinguish the 'Spanish' language from other languages spoken in Spain (Vasco, Gallego and Catalán), which are all official 'Spanish' languages. Cubans, for example, frequently refer to their language as 'Castellano', although they speak quite a heavy dialect at times, very different from what is spoken in Spain (stuff like "yo son", and they have incorporated Congolese, Dahomean and Yoruba words into their language). It's still the same language, in the same sense as British English and American English are.

I just thought that I'd mention that portuguese has 6 different "times" for each verb, plus 6 different "voices" (don't know the proper terms in english, sorry. :|)

While some of them (in particular, 2nd voice in both singular and plural) aren't often used, you still need to know all of them.

It only gets better with irregular verbs.

The "voices" are:
1st Singular: Eu (I)
2nd Singular: Tu (You in archaic form)
3rd Singular: Ele (He)
1st Plural: Nós (We)
2nd Plural: Vós (You in archaic form)
3rd Plural: Eles (They)

The "times" are:
Pretérito imperfeito (inperfect past)
Pretérito perfeito (perfect past)
Pretérito mais-que-perfeito (more-than-perfect past; and try to figure out what THAT means)
Presente (present)
Futuro do pretérito (future of past)
Futuro do presente (future of present)

Now let's try the conjugations of one of the 20 irregular verbs. For example, "ser" (to be): (by the way, I stole this from a website because not even I know all of it)

Modo Indicativo

Presente
(eu) sou
(tu) és
(ele) é
(nós) somos
(vós) sois
(eles) são

Pretérito perfeito
(eu) fui
(tu) foste
(ele) foi
(nós) fomos
(vós) fostes
(eles) foram

Pretérito imperfeito
(eu) era
(tu) eras
(ele) era
(nós) éramos
(vós) éreis
(eles) eram

Pretérito mais-que-perfeito
(eu) fora
(tu) foras
(ele) fora
(nós) fôramos
(vós) fôreis
(eles) foram

Futuro do presente
(eu) serei
(tu) serás
(ele) será
(nós) seremos
(vós) sereis
(eles) serão

Futuro do pretérito
(eu) seria
(tu) serias
(ele) seria
(nós) seríamos
(vós) seríeis
(eles) seriam

Modo Subjuntivo

Presente
(eu) seja
(tu) sejas
(ele) seja
(nós) sejamos
(vós) sejais
(eles) sejam

Pretérito imperfeito
(eu) fosse
(tu) fosses
(ele) fosse
(nós) fôssemos
(vós) fôsseis
(eles) fossem

Futuro do pretérito
(eu) for
(tu) fores
(ele) for
(nós) formos
(vós) fordes
(eles) forem

Modo Imperativo

Imperativo afirmativo
sê (tu)
seja (você)
sejamos (nós)
sede (vós)
sejam (vocês)

Imperativo negativo
sejas (tu)
seja (você)
sejamos (nós)
sejais (vós)
sejam (vocês)

Formas Nominais

Infinitivo pessoal
(eu) ser
(tu) seres
(ele) ser
(nós) sermos
(vós) serdes
(eles) serem

Infinitivo impessoal
ser

Gerúndio
sendo

Particípio
sido

Plus some completelly insane grammar structure and irregular pronounciations... yea, let's adopt portuguese as the official language of the world!

(now that'd be chaotic)

My all-rules-no-exceptions-just-add-postfixes finnish sounds better by the minute.

For me perfect .

The thing i can't understand with the spanish-portuguese-italian menage-a-trois has a very funny thing:

Spaniards can understand italians even if they never learnt that language.
Italians can't understand spanish as well as them.
Portugueses can understand spaniards even if they never learnt that language.
Spaniards can't understand portuguese.

That just like with finns and estonians. Reportedly estonians can uderstand finns just fine but estonian to uss sounds like finnish on steroids with the words backwards. Probably very common with people who speak relative languages. (except that norwegians and swedes can understand each other just fine)