Chu vi parolas Svahile?

[fajrdrako]

From Livejournal's Writer's Block:Which language(s) do you currently speak? If you could learn only one other language, what would you choose, and why?

I speak, read and write English. Canadian English.

I used to be able to speak, read and write Canadian French, though with a vocabulary that was never quite as large as your average Francophone. This includes having read volumes of Old French and Anglo-Norman. And studying French Literature as an undergraduate, and spending a couple of months studying Acadian language and literature in Nova Scotia. (I adored reading Antonine Maillet!)

I was (and always am) better at understanding than speaking any language.

I also studied Italian, reading, speaking and writing it well enough to pass exams, and using it well enough to get on in Italy without much difficulty. I haven't practised it in years, and so lost my fluency. Ditto Latin, though I never did master verbal Latin and would dearly like to. I sometimes recite poetry to myself in these languages just to retain some of it.

I studied German, and have forgotten most of it. Ditto Welsh and Arabic. Really, I just took the introductory levels, not enough to hold much of a conversation... fascinating but difficult. I never could make all the right sounds in Arabic. Heck, I don't even pronounce things well in English.

As for Esperanto... I need more practice, but it's my favourite. I studied most of these as a teen, when I had more time to do it. It was something I shared with my father, who was likewise fascinated by languages, but didn't use them verbally. He encouaged me to be ambitious in picking up languages as much as possible. I once found him reading an Agatha Christie novel in Turkish. "I didn't know you knew Turkish," I said.

"I don't know it very well," he said sheepishly.

He taught me a little (very little) Sanskrit, which was fascinating, but all those declensions terrified me.

As for the why, well, I love languages, and poking at how they work. I love seeing the history of languages, seeing how one language morphs into another, how they effect each other and part ways. I love the compare and contrast of disparate and similar languages, and the psychology by which we use them. I love the legends and myths of history, and idioms, and speculation, and the way language works with odd mechanisms. I wish I had twenty lifetimes to study a thousand languages, because I'm really not doing so well in this one.

I don't know if I want to learn to speak them, but I'd like to learn more about Basque, Finnish, Maltese, Assyrian, Ancient Egyptian and Breton.

I find myself curious now about Chinese and Japanese, but I'd really, really like to learn Occitan. And Anglo-Saxon. And Greek, both classical and modern. And...

Really, I want to learn them all.