Hi everyone,

This is fantastic, that there are plenty of other language fans here and such a diversity of languages that you know or are learning!

I'm only fluent in English; I learned Japanese to Year 12 (end of high school) level, mainly because it was the language on offer at my schools, but I haven't really used it since. At university I did two semesters of Biblical Hebrew and three of New Testament Greek — fascinating and very useful for Bible studies, but I can't speak either of those languages in their modern form.

Now that I'm living long term in the UK (I'm an Aussie), I would love to learn at least one of the other more widely spoken European languages, especially for the usefulness of it when travelling — I can piece together a few words in French, Spanish and German, but can't say I have any level of real fluency or understanding. I also have a personal connection with Polish, as it's my mum's native language (she grew up bilingual in Australia), but my generation of the family never spoke it and I've never felt driven to learn it so far. Maybe one day...

One thing I've been very interested in for years, though, is the effort to save the endangered languages of the world — many of them dying out at an alarming rate, as you're probably all aware. I'd thought for a while how cool it would be to learn an endangered language and help to keep it going. But I didn't find one that I felt specially drawn to until I moved to Britain about 8 years ago and learned about the Cornish language, one of the indigenous British languages, which I'd always been told was extinct. In fact it started to be revived over 100 years ago and while it isn't used in any permanently settled communities as a day-to-day language (yet?), there are several hundred fluent speakers (500 is the usual estimate) and many others with at least some ability in it, and the numbers are growing.

I have Cornish ancestry on my dad's side — traceable back to the 1500s in an area that was largely Cornish-speaking at that time — and from the first time I visited Cornwall, I fell in love with the place. So I felt I just had to become a Cornish speaker too! I've been learning for about three years now and have started taking the Cornish Language Board's official exams — my second grade ones will hopefully be mid next year.

I'm posting about the Cornish language in particular here because, as I was saying in another thread, my now-no-longer-secret ambition is to translate the Chronicles of Narnia into Cornish. All seven of them. There's a growing demand for children's literature in the Cornish language; these are my favourite children's books in the world (and the ones that have had the biggest impact on my life, faith-wise); there's definitely a small but substantial Cornish-speaking Christian community out there who'd welcome them as well... ytho, prag na (so, why not)???

I'm not at the level of fluency to be able to translate a whole book yet, but that will come (and in the higher levels of language classes, we study the medieval Cornish plays based on the creation of the world, the Passion and Resurrection, and lives of the Cornish saints, so that should be helpful in its own way). In the meantime, here are the titles of the seven Chronicles in Cornish (in Lewis's original publication order, which I prefer), as far as I can render them...

An Lew, an Wragh ha'n Dhilasva
Pennsevik Caspian
Viaj ??? an Bora (still not sure which word to use for "Treader"!!)
An Gador Arghansek
An Margh ha'y Vaw
Noy an Huder
An Diwettha Batel

As they say, watch this space...

The mention of New Testament Greek reminded me of a friend at university who did a course in New Testament Greek and tried to use it on holiday in Greece. He wanted to hire a boat, and his request to the boatman made the latter collapse with laughter. It came out as something like: "Hail, mariner! Would that we could hire thy quinquireme, for to fly across the ocean!"

The mention of New Testament Greek reminded me of a friend at university who did a course in New Testament Greek and tried to use it on holiday in Greece. He wanted to hire a boat, and his request to the boatman made the latter collapse with laughter. It came out as something like: "Hail, mariner! Would that we could hire thy quinquireme, for to fly across the ocean!"

Because we have a large migrant population, many of the most recent arrivals were struggling with English, especially the Australian version of English. Therefore English for Speakers of Other Languages was a well attended course of study for the Technical College where I worked. Also, we did courses at work to help us cope with day to day customer service & to encourage us to be empathetic & culturally sensitive. Like most government-funded establishments here, we have multilingual signs around the college for the benefit of those speaking the more usual migrant languages like Vietnamese, Chinese (hopeless ), Arabic & Russian ( both also hopeless), Greek (not so bad due to algebra, statistics etc), Italian, Spanish, Portuguese etc. French, which I did study up to University level, is almost always absent, & the nearest other language to French is Portuguese, rather than Spanish. Whilst there, one fun activity while U wait, & wait... was to try to match up the foreign language versions with what they are trying to say in English. A teacher suggested we look at the languages & see which ones we found easiest to figure out what is said without an English version being available to us. Eg, Courtenay's Cornish example:

An Lew, an Wragh ha'n Dhilasva

The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, I expect.

Pennsevik Caspian

Pennsevik there has to mean Prince. By the way Pen in place names, like Penrith or Penshurst is something to do with head, so does Pen or Penn in Pennsevik mean something like Head lord, perhaps? Just like a Duke comes from the Latin word Dux, Ducis, meaning leader. Penrith, by the way, actually means Red Head. Cornish, Welsh, Breton & probably the original Celtic language of the tribes of Strathclyde must have been Brythonic rather than Gaelic, like in Gaul, Scotland & Ireland.

Viaj ??? an Bora (still not sure which word to use for "Treader"!!)

Viaj then means Voyage doesn't it? Whilst Bora is the Dawn?

An Gador Arghansek

The Silver Chair, I expect. But in Cornish, do you put the adjective first, like in English or do you put it following as in French? "Arghansek", because of its similarity to Argentum in Latin, L'Argent in French & Ag in the Periodical table in Chemistry, must surely mean silver in Cornish as well, whilst Gador must mean chair. C'était La Chaise Argent en Français. By the way, where you have other metals to mine such as tin & lead, it sometimes happens that Silver is also mined there. Would that also be the case in Cornwall?

An Margh ha'y Vaw

I guess that Margh means horse whilst Vaw means boy?

Noy an Huder

Noy must mean "nephew" whilst "Huder" means Magician. Or is it the other way around?

An Diwettha Batel

Now this is tricky. I take it that Diwettha is last, whilst Batel could be battle? Or, again, it could be the other way around as in the Silver Chair.

Whilst there, one fun activity while U wait, & wait... was to try to match up the foreign language versions with what they are trying to say in English. A teacher suggested we look at the languages & see which ones we found easiest to figure out what is said without an English version being available to us.

I love doing that with signs in other languages everywhere I go too!

An Lew, an Wragh ha'n Dhilasva

The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, I expect.

Yep.

Pennsevik Caspian

Pennsevik there has to mean Prince. By the way Pen in place names, like Penrith or Penshurst is something to do with head, so does Pen or Penn in Pennsevik mean something like Head lord, perhaps?

It does mean head-something, but my dictionary is not forthcoming with the exact meaning of the "sevik" part!!

Viaj ??? an Bora (still not sure which word to use for "Treader"!!)

Viaj then means Voyage doesn't it? Whilst Bora is the Dawn?

Yes on both counts. That's a typical quirk of grammar in Celtic languages (at least in the Brythonic ones), which use "the" and "of" a lot less than English would in a chain of nouns — where we say "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", the logical phrasing in Cornish would be literally "Voyage Treader the Dawn". It sounds funny from an English-speaking perspective, but if you turn that wording around and make it "The Dawn Treader's Voyage", that's more like what the Cornish actually means and why it doesn't need the extra "the" and "of" that the English title has.

An Gador Arghansek

The Silver Chair, I expect. But in Cornish, do you put the adjective first, like in English or do you put it following as in French? "Arghansek", because of its similarity to Argentum in Latin, L'Argent in French & Ag in the Periodical table in Chemistry, must surely mean silver in Cornish as well, whilst Gador must mean chair.

Yes, usually the adjective comes after the noun (there are a few adjectives that go before it, rather like French). "Chair" is actually "kador" — it mutates to "gador" after "an" (the) because it's a feminine singular noun. Mutations are fun. (They're something that happens in all the Celtic languages.)

"Arghans" is silver (same root as the Latin, you're right). I made it "arghansek" as an adjective — "silvery" — although it might be more correct to say An Gador Arghans for a chair that is literally made of silver. I'll need to follow that up with a more expert linguist. The main reason I'm hesitating is that "arghans" can also mean money — presumably from the time when coins were made out of real silver — and so An Gador Arghans could also mean The Money Chair.

By the way, where you have other metals to mine such as tin & lead, it sometimes happens that Silver is also mined there. Would that also be the case in Cornwall?

It is, actually! I don't think Cornwall has huge deposits of silver (more tin and copper), but it does have some. I read somewhere that of all the types of mineral on earth, 90% of them are found in the Cornish peninsula, but I don't know how accurate that is...

An Margh ha'y Vaw

I guess that Margh means horse whilst Vaw means boy?

Yes. "Boy" is "Maw", actually — the V is another mutation (after "y" for "his").

Noy an Huder

Noy must mean "nephew" whilst "Huder" means Magician. Or is it the other way around?

Yes, the first way around. Again, it's that quirk of Cornish word order — literally "Nephew the Magician" = "The Magician's Nephew". (Whereas I expect in French you would have to make it "The Nephew of the Magician".)

An Diwettha Batel

Now this is tricky. I take it that Diwettha is last, whilst Batel could be battle?

Yes. Actually, comparatives/superlatives in Cornish can go either before or after the noun and I don't think one way is considered more "correct" than the other. I've phrased it as "An Diwettha Batel" because it's the same as the word order in English, but I believe it would be equally correct to say "An Vatel Dhiwettha" (more mutations there for a feminine singular noun and the adjective following it). I've still got a lot of grammar to learn before I can be absolutely sure on some of these things...

Well parsed! Now it's late in the UK and I must get to

Just a quick post to say that one of the things my kids and I have started doing during a combination summer vacation and Covid-19 stay at home order, is we've started doing Spanish on DuoLingo. Of course my daughter has immediately been taken with it because she's Miss Language.   But it's been kind of fun doing some oddball things over the summer that we wouldn't normally do.  

I used to use Duolingo, but I've been quite inactive as of late.  My problem is I always try to learn too much at once and then burn myself out.  (But I wanna learn them all! )

Anyways, I'm a native English (specifically American-English) speaker who loves driving my southern husband crazy with my northern pronunciation of the word "pecan."  That being said I've picked up some British-English quirks via various books on accident and now I find myself spelling "grey" with an "e" and "armour" with a "u."  (Google auto-correct hates me for the latter, by the way.)

I *was* fairly fluent in Spanish as well, I took 6 years of it in middle and high school.  Though I was never as good as a native speaker I was advanced enough to be able to follow the whole conversation in class or read a smaller chapter book.  But I barely use it now so it's hard for me to recall it when someone needs a translation.  Still though when I do put the effort in I find it's a fairly easy for me to pick it back up again (ie when I was on Duolingo).  

In college I chose to take German instead of Spanish in order to get a bit of a change and also because there are a number of German-Speaking countries in my paternal family background.  I only took two years of it, but I can form beginner sentences (although, as with Spanish it's quite rusty now).

On Duolingo I tried learning a number of languages such as Irish (I know it's technically called something else, but that's what they call it) and Japanese.  I haven't gotten nearly as far with these.

As for invented languages I know a number of words in Sindarian (Tolkien) and Lapine (Richard Adams - though to my knowledge there's not really a full lexicon of Lapine out there and it's only partially invented.)  I also loved C.S. Lewis's invented language from Out of the Silent Planet (again it's really only a small partial lexicon) but I don't remember nearly as much as I should.  

Edit: I forgot to mention... I don't really know Greek and Latin, but my interest in Zoology and Paleontology has led to me picking up the meanings of a number of Greek and Latin based roots in scientific names. 
For example Pteranodon means "Toothless wing or Toothless flier"  And while I'm not sure what "Agkistrodon" means exactly, I'm guessing it has something to do with the word tooth based on the -don/-odon suffix.  *Looks it up now...  apparently it means "Fishhook tooth."  Agkistrodon is the name for the genus of pit vipers including copperheads and the cottonmouth by the way.  

EDIT 2 weeks later:

For those who've learned multiple foreign languages have you found it harder or easier the second time?

I kind of have a mix... mostly due to cognates.  On one hand you'll find cognates between Spanish and German that aren't shared with English.  For example, "the library" in Spanish is "la biblioteca" and in German it's "die Bibliothek."  This made it much easier for me to learn the German word, as I already knew the Spanish.  Also, learning about gender of German articles for the was easier after already being introduced to the concept in Spanish, since English doesn't really have that.  They have a similar verb system as well.  But on the other hand with some words my poor brain was so used to the Spanish that it used it in place of the German... for example, "es" (the Spanish) instead of "es ist" (the German) for "it is" was a common mistake I'd make because they were so similar.  Also it could be hard to remember if a word was gender neutral in German since in Spanish it was either masculine or feminine (Spanish doesn't have a neutral gender).  I'd also mix up some non-neutral ones that aren't the same gender in Spanish.

What cognates have you found between 2 foreign languages that your native language may or may not share?

We've been getting into an interesting side discussion, in the First-Shall-Be-Last Geography game, about the Australian national anthem — which has just had a minor but meaningful change to its lyrics — and the implications of translating it into Aboriginal languages. On the advice of @valiantarcher, I'm copying the relevant posts to here as a more appropriate place for the topic and any further discussion of it.  

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

More seriously, on this morning's news it has been proclaimed that the Australian national anthem has undergone a very minor change. Just as the original anthem's reference to Australia's sons let us rejoice, was changed to Australians all, let us rejoice, to include the daughters as well as the sons, today we now sing For we are one & free, instead of For we are young and free. This minor change reflects that Australia's Aborigines have been here for tens of thousands of years, well before even Kirkuk [ancient city in Iraq] was founded. It also includes old aged pensioners.  

Posted by: @courtenay

Love it! I never stopped to think about that before (and hadn't heard about the new wording till now... not much news from Australia gets picked up in Britain), but that's a very fair change. (EDIT: I tell a lie — it was actually reported on the BBC's website. I'm impressed!)

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

It wasn't until I woke up yesterday morning that the Governor General had released the info. Just in time to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Federation, on 1/1/1901, by the way. About the National anthem, there is still talk about singing a verse of Advance Australia Fair, in an Aboriginal language, like the New Zealanders sing their National Anthem in both Maori & English.  Question is, which one? The Wallabies did this late last year, or a month or two ago, but they did so in Dharruk, the language of the Sydney basin & up towards the Hunter Valley. 

Posted by: @coracle

[re the question of which indigenous Australian language, before we end this discussion, I think it should be decided by a council of elders from all the major language groups, if such a council exists; in New Zealand there are dialects of the same language, but then the first people have only been here about  800 years]

Posted by: @courtenay

I can't think of any particular authority that would be able to decide that officially... the difficulty is that there are or were at least 250 Aboriginal languages in Australia, including some 800 dialects, and each of them associated with a very specific place and people. So there's no one Aboriginal language that could ever stand for the whole of Australia, only individual languages for local areas. Singing Advance Australia Fair in Dharruk is appropriate for the Sydney region, but it would be wrong for Melbourne, where the indigenous languages were Woiwurong and Bunurong. (Neither of which is still spoken as a living language; I think some knowledge of them has been preserved — I'd love to know more about that — but I don't know if it's enough to be able to translate the whole national anthem successfully!) And for Brisbane it would need to be the Yagera language, and for Perth the Nyungar language, and so on. So while I love the idea of our anthem being sung in an Aboriginal language, it's not such an easy thing to implement in practice...  

That's very interesting, wagga and Courtenay! I have something of an interest in national anthems, and enjoy listening to the Human Nature/Julie Anthony version of "Advance Australia Fair" that opened the 2000 Sydney Olympics (it's truly an awesome performance). So I'm familiar with the "young and free" lyrics but hadn't heard about this new change.

Also on topic, my dad's parents were French Canadian and during our annual visits (it was a long trip to make back then, as they still lived close to the Canadian border) they would speak French to each other and around my dad, and had the most wonderful French accents when speaking English to us kids.

That discussion was my fault, my most grievous fault & thank you, Valia, Coracle & Courtenay, for getting it transferred it here.  

Posted by:@coracle

[re the question of which indigenous Australian language, before we end this discussion, I think it should be decided by a council of elders from all the major language groups, if such a council exists; in New Zealand there are dialects of the same language, but then the first people have only been here about  800 years]

Yes, I've heard that there are Maori stories extant about how their ancestors migrated from Hawaii to Aotearoa. I first heard the New Zealand national anthem at the Anzac Centenary of 2015 at Gallipoli. I think it is only one verse that is sung in both Maori & English. That is the general idea if we Australians follow suit. For our anthem there are two verses, & it is only the 1st verse that might be repeated, whether Dharruk, or whether, I suspect, Pitjantjatjara, for Uluru, because of the emphasis the Aborigines have placed on it. 

That change in our national anthem is in line with other changes, that may be on the cards for us here. In 2017, on our National Sorry Day, in Reconciliation week, there was a meeting at Uluru, where a group of Aboriginal elders met with both the Prime Minister & the Leader of the Opposition to find a way to make constitutional changes to eliminate any disadvantage to Aboriginal people that still exist, & to give Aborigines a combined Voice in the matter. That may be the very thing you have suggested. In the end it was the only issue in the last election that everyone could agree on. 

@Courtenay: The trouble with a lot of Aboriginal languages, is that they may have died out completely, such as the Tasmanian Palawa. In New South Wales we not only have the Dharruk, but also the Wiradjuri, down near Wagga, & the Kamilaroi, I think, up towards the Queensland borders, where the Aborigines call themselves the Murri, rather than Koori. There is beginning a more concerted effort now to study & preserve such languages in learning institution, & even in the HSC some students attained top ranking in Aboriginal studies, when their results were published a fortnight ago.  

On New Year's Day we were watching a version of Scotland's annual Edinburgh Military Tattoo, performed in Sydney a year or so ago. There were performers from not only the usual Swiss Top Secret drummers, but also entries from France, the Shetland Islands, Fiji, & other Pacific Islands, UK & New Zealand, of course. Both Papua/New Guinea & Indonesia also sent entries, which was very interesting. To break up the show into sections, the Aborigines helping to organise it, used their own cultures, languages & dancing to demonstrate where the various groups came from: 1. Central & Western Australia. 2. North of Australia (UK etc, plus Indonesia) 3. East ie Papua Niugini & Pacific Islanders, like Vanuatu or Fiji. Lastly the New Zealanders represented South, with not only the Scottish dancing & military bands, but also a rather fearsome haka. There was also a duet with a clarinet & a didgeridoo which was interesting to listen to.