Do some words in English ever sound foreign to you?

Jeremybeach · 10-23-2009, 05:23 PM

You know them well--
You know what they mean
but one day, you feel overly-analytical and you say the word "screw up" and realize that if it didn't have the word "up" in it, it'd mean something entirely different!!
Wow our language is sooo weird haha

Does anybody else ever play around with language and realize how weird it can be?!

ThisCouldBeHeavn · 10-23-2009, 05:56 PM

screw up is a phrase
and yeah, if you remove a word from any phrase in any language it can have a large impact on the meaning of the phrase

math+sci=asian · 10-23-2009, 09:14 PM

The hardest languages to learn are (behind Icelandic) Chinese (+other symbol based Asian languages - Japanese, memorization is annoying...went through 5 years of chinese school and i still can't read or write) and English (almost everything is a grammatical exception...no logic). I don't know about Swahili and Arabic since I've never learned any of it remotely. Easiest is Esperanto hands down.

And ThisCouldBeHeaven, that sounds like a new CC game....

rockermcr · 10-23-2009, 10:16 PM

I will never understand why everyone thinks Icelandic is so difficult to learn. I mean, it's so ridiculously similar to many other Scandinavian languages like Swedish or Dutch that you might as well just claim that all Scandinavian languages are "the most" difficult to learn. Seriously. Icelandic differs from Swedish in that it borrowed less words from other languages and is thus more different from English. It's slightly more archaic than Swedish or Dutch, and, as such, people who are fluent can easily understand old Swedish and old Dutch.

So, basically, learning Icelandic is the English equivalent to learning Chaucerian English. It's hard, but just as hard as learning any other language.

u§ername · 10-24-2009, 04:53 PM

Try hebrew...

Chinese isn't that hard in terms of speaking... I mean there's just a few thousand words to know instead of the tens of thousands of commonly used words in english.

math+sci=asian · 10-24-2009, 05:20 PM

Yea, username, Chinese is much easier to speak (I'm fluent but I can't read or write)

Saugus · 10-25-2009, 02:52 PM

ALL THE TIME. Whenever I think of a word for too long of a time, it starts to sound weird and it seems like I haven't used it before.

Dionysus58 · 10-31-2009, 01:43 PM

Quote:

I will never understand why everyone thinks Icelandic is so difficult to learn. I mean, it's so ridiculously similar to many other Scandinavian languages like Swedish or Dutch that you might as well just claim that all Scandinavian languages are "the most" difficult to learn. Seriously. Icelandic differs from Swedish in that it borrowed less words from other languages and is thus more different from English. It's slightly more archaic than Swedish or Dutch, and, as such, people who are fluent can easily understand old Swedish and old Dutch.

So, basically, learning Icelandic is the English equivalent to learning Chaucerian English. It's hard, but just as hard as learning any other language.

This is one big facepalm of a post. You are wrong on every level. And btw, Dutch isn't a Scandinavian language.

colboy · 11-02-2009, 12:00 AM

well its better to be pi$$ed off than pi$$ed on

GrizzMom · 11-02-2009, 12:05 AM

screw up and ****ed off are phrasal verbs, like hang up (the phone), or run into (a friend)

rockermcr · 11-02-2009, 12:23 AM

Quote:

This is one big facepalm of a post. You are wrong on every level. And btw, Dutch isn't a Scandinavian language.

You're right. I meant to say Danish, but for some reason confused the two. If you replace "Dutch" with "Danish," I assure you I am no longer "wrong on every level."

Dionysus58 · 11-02-2009, 10:14 AM

Quote:

You're right. I meant to say Danish, but for some reason confused the two. If you replace "Dutch" with "Danish," I assure you I am no longer "wrong on every level."

I'm afraid you still are. Icelandic is very difficult to learn because of its archaic vocabulary and complex grammar.

No Icelandic is not ridiculously similar to other Scandinavian languages. It is true that mainland Scandinavian languages are all very alike and can be easily understood by one another. This is not true for Icelandic, which thanks to Iceland's remoteness and insular nature has hardly changed at all in a millennium.

Its closest relative is Old Norse. Old English too is not unlike Icelandic (and here we must note that Old English is not Chaucerian English as you allude.) In fact Chaucer wrote and spoke Middle English, which is much, much less difficult than its predecessor.

I'd also be interested to know how you can confuse Dutch and Danish? Granted they both begin with a D, but the similarities end there.