This item is a bit like the short-question item in agora: here you can enter
your little questions about languages, language usage, etc. if they don't
quite fit in any of the other items or if you don't think that they're worth
entering their own item for.  Well, feel free to ask away here!

26 responses total.

Well, in agora I had a question about the written Thai language after other
(who's in Thailand right now, apparently) said that the keyboards had Thai
symbols (not his word, mine; I forgot his) on them as well as Roman letters.
That made me curious: does Thai use a character system like Chinese and the
Japanese kanji, a syllibary like the Japanese kana, a pure syllibary, an
alphabet, or something completely different?

I _think_ (don't quote me on this) that it has it's own set of characters
unrelated to the Chinese or Japanese system. At least, Thai-restaurant menus
look nothing like Chinese- or Japanese-restaurant menus :)
Actually, Siam Kitchen in Ann Arbor has menus that list the names of foods
in Roman letters and in Thai letters; I spent dinner there once trying to
figure out the system, but I couldn't really make sense of it. It looked to
me like it was in the 'something completely different' category, though.

"Thai is written in an alphabet derived from the Devanagari script of southern
India and has 42 consonant signs, 4 tone markers, and many vowel markers."
-- Encyclopedia Britannica.  

Well, there we go.  It's an alphabet.  (Although I wonder why albaugh never
checked this item... he told me to make it).  *shrugs*

Hey, you never know who's *lurking* !  :-)

Eeps!  Hmph, but you left it for somebody else to answer, so I've been in
suspense this whole time.  The last time I was at Borders I even went over
to the language section to see if they had a 'Teach Yourself Thai' book, and
I think I decided that it was an alphabet, but I didn't actually *read* it,
so I wasn't certain.

Re #3: South Indian languages are *not* written in Devanagari script;
they use Dravidian scripts. Devanagari is the alphabet of Sanskrit,
considered as the language of 'Deva's (gods). The scripts of most
*North* Indian languages (like Hindi) are derived from it.

(South Indian languages: Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu)

I'll bite: What sort of characters are the South Indian languages written in?

And now I've got another question, too: Sinhalese is spoken in Sri Lanka,
right?  What family of languages does it belong to?  Its alphabet (at least
I *think* it's an alphabet), is very unique-looking.

This response has been erased.

Hmm, a Web search indicates that Tamil script was developed in the eigth
century AD from Grantha script. The page also says that there are *some*
similarities between Tamil and Devanagari, though it does not give more
details. I'll check up and report tomorrow.

As far as Sinhalese is considered, I have no idea.

My dictionary calls it "An Aryan tongue with many Dravidian words"
I don't know if that helps you any. The little table next to the entry groups
it with most of the other Indian languages.
What's the alphabet look like? I've never seen it before...

(Assumes orinoco's talking about Sinhalese)
Well, it's very loopy looking... kind-of like doodles one might make while
really bored.  In those Gideon Bibles that are in hotel rooms they've got a
small passage translated into 19 or so languages, one of which is Sinhalese,
so if you can find one of those, that's a better example than I can describe.

My Sri Lankan contact here at work asserts that Sinhalese derives from
Sanskrit as the Indian languages do.  Yes, it has its own character set,
but...

the sinhalese themselves are believed to have come from northern india 
to sri lanka fairly quickly - sanskrit derivation is the most widely 
accepted view.

as far as thai goes, it's a pretty straightforward alphabet, with a few 
more letters than the roman, and the interesting quirk that while it is 
mostly read from left to right, some vowels are written before the 
consonant that precedes them in speech, some above, and some beneath - 
reading it can seem like something of a gymnastic exercise...

So there's a one-year foreign language requirement here, and I'm looking for
something a little unusual to fill it; I've taken bits and pieces of Spanish,
Latin, and Greek, and I thought it might be fun to study a non-European
language.  So....

What languages besides English and Spanish tend to be used as common
languages?  Is there any language in particular that serves as a lingua franca
in Asia or Africa, the way Spanish does in S.America?  

Grex has a lot of Indian users (and is probably my main source of contact with
non-English speakers), but I'm told that India has a lot of unrelated
languages.  Is there any particular language that a majority of Indian Grexers
speak?  

So much for "short querstion".....ah well....

India uses English.  Africa uses English and French.  If you want something
more interesting, try Arabic or Chinese.  If you don't care whether you get
much chance to practice, try Turkish, Malay, Tagalog, etc.  Is there some
country you always wanted to visit?

Yes.  

Oh, did you mean _one_ country?  I doubt I could narrow it down that far. 

Arabic could be interesting.  Chinese too, but I was under the impression that
it wasn't very widespread.

Japanese or Hebrew could be fun.  I like Irish, although the modern language
isn't going to help me read the early myths and stuff.
What about ASL?  That's amazingly useful.

Ooh, hadn't even thought of that.  I think there's an ASL class in the
linguistics department....I may do that.

About a billion people in China speak some form of Chinese as a first or
second language, plus there are Chinese people in Malaysia.  It would be a
fascinating country to visit, knowing the language.  And there are plenty of
people to practice on now in this country (at least at the universities).
ASL is American Sign Language.  Other countries (France, anyway) use entirely
different sign languages.  I don't know if there are dialects of ASL.
Tell us all about it.

There are dialects of ASL just as with any language; regionalism, and even
differences from school to school.  Then there's "Signed English", which
unlike ASL uses English grammar, word order, and grammatical markers.  Don't
know what's used in other English speaking countries or elsewhere, you'd have
to ask a Deaf peson.

I seem to remember hearing about something called International Sign Language.
I don't know whether it's actually used, or if it's one of those "perfect
language" things like Esperanto that never caught on.

Esperanto caught on in Hungary and Bulgaria.  A Hungarian train conductor was
disappointed that I did not know it, and I found a Bulgarian-Esperanto
dictionary.

Really?  Interesting...

Probably the most useful would be Mandarin (Chinese).

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