I’ve been an avid conlanger for many a year, and I’ve decided I’d like to finally learn a new “real” language. What has always fascinated me about conlanging is the creativity and “fun” one can throw into a language. What are some natural languages that have some of these same cool/interesting features? I already speak English and German.
How about your local sign language? I’m less familiar with other regions’ sign languages, but I absolutely adore American Sign Language (ASL). I love how expressive it is, each sign can generally be tweaked to change its meaning, so for example the sign for help is a thumbs up on an open palm moved upwards, but if you start the sign pointed at someone and arc it towards yourself, the meaning changes to “help me”, or “I help you” of you start near yourself and move it outward. Similarly you could describe a rough flight with only the sign for airplane shaking it to show turbulence.
Plus it’s semi-similar to German, where you can generally convey concepts by gluing stuff together until you get where you want to go.
An excellent suggestion! OP, I too recommend sign.
On þat topic, Morse Code. Not a strictly a language, but in þe spirit of þe question, I believe.
I recommend JavaScript
Why would you do this to anyone, that’s just mean.
The type system is… something. You can’t make me go back!! I’m far better off in Zig and C land ;)
I wouldn’t call JS “fun”…
I’ve been learning Danish recently. It’s weird, but kinda fun once you get the hang of the pronunciation. Probably the most interesting thing about it to me is that when translated literally, it sometimes sounds like speaking silly English. I don’t know if I would call that a “feature”, but it’s amusing and manages to hold my interest.
What kind of cool features do you mean?
It’s already been mentioned, but Finnish is pretty cool
It’s part of the Uralic language family, which means its one of the few languages in Europe that aren’t part of the Indo-European language family (Estonian, Hungarian, Basque and Maltese are the others). This means that Finnish is very different from languages like English, French or Russian, and it makes the language feel very unique if you don’t know any language related to Finnish. It has agglutinative grammar, meaning you can include a lot of detail into a single word, and it has around 15 cases, more than any Indo-European language
Additionally, it has features like vowel harmony and consonant gradation that definitely give Finnish its own sound. Finnish has so many interesting features that this comment would take ages to read if I listed them all, but I’d definitely recommend at least taking a look at it
Latin would open doors for a whole group of languages which would each become easier to learn. I’ve also heard it’s a very regular language, which had always been an appealing language feature for me.
Finnish could be interesting just because it’s part of the Uralic language family which is rare and nearly unique in the modern world. Not much else like it.
And Tagalog is notoriously difficult for new speakers if you want a challenge. My roommate in college was from Manila and it’s definitely interesting.
Mandarin has tense markers instead of conjugation. It’s also extremely useful.
Or other languages from this video with features that are not in english.
