[gleeaikin]

Ah, languages, one of my favorite topics. For the moment I will talk about Spanish. Spanish has 4 forms of you—tu and vosotros (seldom used) for thee singular and plural; Usted formal singular, Ustedes formal plural. It has two verbs for “to be”—ser and estar. Ser for permanent states—I am a man, estar for temporary states—I am tired. More difficult are the two categories of verb forms—Indicative and Subjunctive. Indicative is something which actually is—I came to school (I actually did that). Subjunctive—Come to school (this may or may not happen and takes a different verb form. In Spanish almost half of the sentences with verbs are subjunctive—that is, things might or might not happen. Germans don’t have that problem, most things are very certain. The Romance languages, and it seems often the people have the more uncertain quality based on the subjunctive. A rare English form can be seen in “If I were king.” versus “When I am king.”

I took a linguistics class in Mexico and we studied a little Aztec (Nahuatl). They have a form called an “infix” while we only have prefix and suffix. I want to eat tortillas can be written: Nicnequi nicua tlaxcalli or Nicnequi nitlaxcalcua, or something like that. I took the course 50 years ago. But I have not seen that in germanic or romance language forms.

[SunkenCiv]

Something related to the overall topic, I'd meant to post this earlier.

Uncracked Ancient Codes
(Lost Languages reviewed)
by William C. West

As longtime literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement in London, Andrew Robinson is well able to interpret the arcana of scientific discoveries for the general public. In Lost Languages, he explains the principles of three famous decipherments and applies the insights gained to an understanding of several undeciphered scripts—Linear A, the Etruscan alphabet, the Phaistos disc, and the Meroitic, Proto-Elamite, rongorongo, Zapotec, Isthmian and Indus scripts.

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Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson

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[Wuli]

Again, upu point up how “concepts” can, or may not be, represented well in a language, and from that “how” folks think can be subject to those differences.

[ThanhPhero]

Many languages have infixes, though I don’t think any of the major languages do. Many of the American Indian languages seem to be composed mostly of in and su and pre fixes to the point that what we think of words is not really relevant. They are declined and conjugated to an extent way past Latin or Greek.

[ThanhPhero]

I learned some Spanish in my Carny years when I had to call the Latinos to my ride st the Western fairs. I never cared for the language, though. It seems to be expressive the way a machine gun is expressive.There are languages that are spoken faster- Vietnamese goes out at more syllables per second- but few with that level machine like patter.