Comments on: The Rosetta Project

By: thekenemy

thekenemy — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:57:14 +0000

Some things about language in Flanders, where I come from.
We are the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The other part speaks French, a few speak German. Everyone in Belgium is tought Dutch and French in school, but most Flemish have great trouble with French and most Walloons have trouble with Dutch.
Virtually everyone in Flanders speaks reasonable English, because from an early age we watch English movies and shows with Dutch subtitles.
Every single tiny village in Flanders used to have it’s own dialect, with differences in accent, vocabulary, expressions… from the next village. These are dissappearing now, but people from one side of Flanders still have trouble understanding people from the other side. And it’s a very small country…
For some reason, people from the north of Holland don’t understand us at all, while we understand them reasonably well. They do sound like cats making love to a frog. I think my particular brand of Dutch sounds a bit like Danish.
And then there’s Brussels, where they speak French with Flemish accents, proverbs etc.
Oddly, we don’t have a common phrase for “I love you”, the closest we get is “‘k zin aa geire” (I like seeing you). This is a bit of a problem in Flemish love songs.
There should be at least 7000 more Rosetta Discs for all the variants of Flemish alone. I’ve always wondered if this is the same in other countries.

By: MacAvity

MacAvity — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:08:48 +0000

Languages are just like animals in this way. When they go extinct, they get turned into stone and buried for long periods of time until somebody digs them up again and tries to reconstruct them. The Rosetta Stone was like the ichthyosaur of all languages. There was also the Epic of Gilgamesh with its Cuneiform writing which was like the Tyrannosaurus Rex of all languages. Languages without written components, like shell-less invertebrates, do not get fossilized. This project is like the thylacine in the jar of preservative, on a grand scale.

In this extended metaphor, Latin is the little dinosaur that evolved into the archeopteryx and from there into all the myriad birds in the world, and Anglo-Saxon is the little rat creature that evolved into all the various hairy beasts of the world. Neither of them is around anymore, but their descendants are, in great numbers. And one of those descendants of the Anglo-Saxon rat creature is in the process of taking over the world.

And thus can the English language be directly compared to the human race.

By: jimnogood1

jimnogood1 — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:43:23 +0000

I think Klingon should be added the Rosetta Project. We should be proactive now, so that we can communicate with them when they arrive in a few hundred years.

By: kc-guy

kc-guy — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:37:44 +0000

One time two Russians were in New York and they needed directions. They initially asked three New Yorkers in Russian but none of them understood. So one of the Russians asked in French. Still no luck. Finally, the other one asked in German but to no avail. The Russians gave up and disgustingly walked away. One of the New Yorkers said, “You know, it’s about time I learned a foreign language.” Another of New Yorkers replied, “What for? Those guys knew three different foreign languages and it didn’t help them.”
*
I’m sick of hearing Europeans complain that Americans don’t know anything about International culture. The US is roughly the size of the ENTIRE CONTINENT of Europe. Why don’t Americans speak 3 languages? Because California and Boston speak (roughly) :D the same language.

The same goes for culture. Americans don’t know as much about the intricacies of French culture as an Italian for a simple reason: America’s ON THE OTHER SIDE ON AN OCEAN.

The end.

By: a1c

a1c — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:48:57 +0000

Cosmopolitanism = homogenization.

Mandarin Chinese + English + ? = ?

By: DontPanic

DontPanic — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:33:00 +0000

[quote]Mirage_GSM said: ” most people will gather from context whether their conversation partner is talking about bears or beers ;-)”[/quote]

did you learn english with an american accent by any chance? where i come from bears and beers sound completely different i thought it silly that they could possibly be muddled. Ha.

By: Mirage_GSM

Mirage_GSM — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:33:50 +0000

[quote]Chanticrow said: “This brings up damn interesting questions about why English is, and is continuing to become, so dominant. There are certainly other languages that are just as expressive as English but easier to learn. English is really a terribly difficult language with all its grammatical, contextual, and spellingual (?!) oddities and exceptions.”[/quote]
My native language is german. I learned english, rench and latin in school, started learning japanese later and know a few phrases in spanish. I also had a few discussions with native speakers of hebrew, finnish and other slavic languages about the grammatical peculiarities of their tongues.
Having said as much, I think english has to be one of the easiest languages to learn for non-native speakers. The grammar is ridiculously easy. Conjugation and declension are almost non-existant compared with other languages.
Some spellings and pronounciations are what you would call unintuitive, but those are details not really necessary for successful communication – most people will gather from context whether their conversation partner is talking about bears or beers ;-)

By: Wooden_Mockingbird

Wooden_Mockingbird — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 13:46:00 +0000

[quote]another opinion said: Dont thou think’st so?[/quote]

For sooth! Thou ‘s most…
Ack. I give up.
XD

By: tarteauxpommes

tarteauxpommes — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:23:03 +0000

[quote]Chanticrow said: “Doubleplus good!”[/quote]

That made me laugh for ten minutes. I just finished reading and annotating _1984_ in my LA class, and we had a big discussion about the destruction of languages. This is a really fascinating subject, actually. I really want to learn more languages (Italian, German, Portuguese, etc.), but my school doesn’t offer very many languages (French, Spanish, German!, Chinese), and even if it did, there’s no more room in my schedule for one. The American school system definitely doesn’t make it easy to take lots of languages.

By: Beautiful Confusion

Beautiful Confusion — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:01:18 +0000

I think that the reason they have wanted to create this stone is because they’re the type of people that would try to study ancient languages and sit around and think that they wished someone would have made something like this a thousand years ago to make it a little (scratch that, a lot) easier. Unfortuanately they can’t go back in time and suggest it to someone but they can do something here and now for the people in the future. Maybe when people stopped writing in hyroglifs (wrong spelling, i know, shush.) they thought “Why continue when we have developed something better?” There’s no way that they could know that people would be studying their culture centuries in the future.