Postby anders » Tue Apr 11, 2006 7:48 pm
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 approach fluency, and know some other trade than linguistics, you might additionally get a financial advantage.
If you want to communicate with as many people as possible in their own language: Chinese and Hindi. But don't be mislead: Hindi is very different from most IE languages. Just seven irregular verbs, and they're regular as well in their own way; just two noun cases; but they've got a fascinating way of their own to complicate verb usage.
If you're an aspiring polyglot wishing to be able to read as many languages as possible, stick to the IE family. Knowing English, Spanish, Latin and Greek, you should be able to pick up several major languages, European and with European roots, as well as some lesser known but never the less quite interesting ones like Afrikaans (with a grammar simple like the mean value of English and Chinese), Fries, Catalan...
And if you're a script nut like me, and/or look for something entirely different, there's Tamil and other Dravidian languages. For scripts etc., Tibetan has a look that is sooo fascinating, and the mismatch between its writing and pronunciation is in a league far superior to even English or French!
Irren ist männlich