A few months ago, I had a coffee together with my Vietnamese/Chinese fellow student and two of her female friends. I was perfectly sure that they spoke some Slavic language, but I couldn't identify any words (I've had some very elementary courses in Russian and Bulgarian). They said it was Albanian!

Why? Wasn't it supposed to come out this way?
Brazilian dude

Yes, but as you must have noticed by now, on preview, all interesting characters/letters turn up as &blabla codes.

My Russian doesn’t even qualify for taking 1st uni semester Russian, but the way I understand it is that сорок is derived from, or can at least can be compared to, Greek σαράκοντα < Old Greek τεσσαράкоντα. So, no magic.

Perry, I do appreciate finding you here. In Swedish, we make a difference between "israeliter" and "israeler", the former being those Arabs who left nomadism and established themselves as sedentary agriculturalists in Palestine, and the latter, being the present-day inhabitants o...

I'm not very interested in many parts of Africa, but for Kashmir

Kash•mir•i
...
—n.
1. a native or inhabitant of Kashmir.
...
and

Kash•mir•i•an
...
—n.
a Kashmiri.

(Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.)

From http://www.languagelog.com/ Numerous journalists have already swallowed the absurdly specious claim that the English language is going to add its millionth word some time later this year. But doesn't "one million" sound a little paltry? Well, never fear. Today the Associated Press tru...

"Unaspirated after s" is not just Conventional Wisdom (TM) as taught in every textbook of phonetics for Germanic languages, but from the practical side, knowing this was a great help in mastering (to at least an acceptable degree) the difference between the aspirated and unaspirated stops ...

Yet another entertaining resurrection of a thread!

I think this test pretty much only works on those who grew up in the US as 'baby boomers'.

Thanks.

English tags feel very strange to me. The positive aspect is that I'm pretty sensitive to and pick up (dis)similar things in other languages. I have already mentioned two Arabic ways. Then there's the subtleties of Chinese questions ending in the particle ma , more often than not translated as "...

If you don't know where you are going, take any road. If you're interested in language universals (if there are such things), pick as diverse languages as possible. You've got Indo-European and one Semitic, so for this case, I'd suggest Chinese. If you're sufficiently young to have a chance to appro...

Which Foreign Language Is Closer To English? a. French b. German c. Spanish d. Gaelic e. Italian Correct answer and historical references will posted within 7 days. Geographically, I'd say d. For syntax, b. For vocabulary, a or b. But generally, I agree with those saying that Frisian is even closer...

No to mention that I distinctly remember having seen in an article on machine translation and/or computational linguistics that the liquor/meat example is just an urban legend.

Anyone who has tried the stuff will realize that machinery never will be able to match us professional translators.

I still regret that I five years ago didn't buy the cook book (in (almost) Swedish) that I saw in a Greek shop. Just like the restaurant case, it prescribed something like "Take your liver, clean it and cut it in small pieces".

I know no Greek at all, so I can't even judge if it's helpful that it isn't inflected in its arch, arcus venae azygos.

University departments of linguistics teaching for example language universals would love it, because there is no chance that the students will find material to plagiarize on the Internet. And there's also at least one language nut who would say, I just need it, because it fills a void in my library...