February 22, 2005

Curious George: Which new language would you most like to learn if given the chance? Why? ... sort of follow-up to this and this.

I enrolled in a Japanese class last week. It won't do much for my professional or social life, and there's no plan to visit Japan in the near future. I just finally gave in to my obsession with Japanese pop culture. French and Spanish would be far more useful to me in Canada; learning either would be an investment. But I've never been the useful kind.

posted by kenshin 19 years ago
  • I took Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Navajo in my high school and college years (I was a Linguistics major). I do love the Romance languages. I've always wanted to try my hand at Porteguese--such a melodic language.
  • I have this thing for dead languages - given the opportunity to satisfy my linguistics req. my MA year by taking an (eminently practical) course in language pedagogy or by taking a (phenomenally useless) Old English course, I didn't even hesitate. And the next semester I even more uselessly took a Beowulf seminar. There's something hauntingly beautiful about reading, say, Homer in the original, or Catullus: these vital human poems that tell us that Humanity Hasn't Really Changed. The next language on my list - more useless than any one I have learned yet - is Sanskrit. I hope to fit it into my graduate work so I don't have to pay for it later on, perhaps by way of T. S. Eliot.
  • I'm going to learn Mandarin, as I'll be spending more time in China in the future.
  • Welsh. For no reason whatsoever. Or Finnish, because I have blood and stepfamily there. Japanese is great and I really should get back to not forgetting it... Everyone should learn Japanese. And reading Catullus in Latin is ever so much fun. Hah.
  • Russian. Any language with that many consonants in a row just has to be cool!
  • Spanish first, because I studied for 4 years in high school, did very well, love the language and could use it in many places. I would love to have conversational fluency. a good excuse to go to mexico more often! after that japanese. not exactly sure why. it seems like a less difficult asian language than some, altho still difficult.
  • Arabic.
  • I'd have to pick three. French- because it just sounds so beautiful. Japanese- Because I love Japanese art/culture/architecture/gardens etc Arabic Because i'm probably moving to Dubai shortly. Plus, if my boyhood dreams of becoming 007 are to come true, this language would be most useful.
  • Spanish, because it would make my professional life easier. Actually, it would probably make my life easier in general.
  • Italian. Any language with that many vowels in a row just has to be cool! I just wish I'd pick a language and stick with it. I can sort of read Spanish, French, and Italian and can speak the last two at the advanced tourist level. An ex is Russian so I took a stab at that one. I got as far as learning the alphabet then decided it'd be easier just to break up with her. My parents speak (or spoke) between them German, Yiddish, Danish, and Japanese (as well as English and French) and I don't know how to say anything in any of them but "I don't speak X", where X is one of the languages. I think I've reached the age where my memory is full so I can only learn new things by forgetting old things. I can't afford to unlearn English so I'm afraid I'll never be fluent (or at least conversant) in any other languages.
  • Russian - because I kind of owe my Russian teacher from college. Chinese - because that's what I wanted to take but they didn't offer it. Welsh - just because.
  • French: I want to spend time in New Caledonia. And anything the American right hate that much has to be good, huh? Huh? Turkish: No gender, and a tense for gossip. What more can I ask for in a language? Maori: It would be nice to know the other official language in my country.
  • I have a strange, senseless and romantic notion that I should try learning Irish Gaelic. Why I should even think of privileging the comatose language of my (supposed) ancestors over, say, re-learning French so that I can actually go to Paris without feeling like such an appalling Brit, I don't know. German, Spanish (for the Latin American magical realists), and both Classical and Modern Arabic would also be nice. But it's a moot point, really, as I'm far too lazy and fidgety to be learning a language right now. Never had too great an aptitude for it, anyway. I do have a Yiddish-English phrasebook on my bedside table, though.
  • I took Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Greek. If, instead, I would have taken Spanish, Spanish, Spanish, and Spanish, then I would be doing so well career-wise that I could pay someone to type these comments. I graduate high school in 1988 and I never heard nor had the sense that I would ever use any language unless I visited a foreign country. So I took the stupid road I mentioned.
  • When I was living in Mexico, I found that as well as needing to speak Spanish, I also needed to pitch my voice higher and sound vaguely excitable at all times because that's how women speaking Spanish in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico spoke. Lots of intangibles with learning a language.
  • Welsh would be cool. I'm already taking Chinese (level 2!!) at my high school, which is the language I am really interested in.
  • Mandarin, that is.
  • Swahili. I have an obsession with Africa and ever since I was quite young, Swahili's been something I've been dying to learn. I also want to learn Hebrew, though I think that'll be a hell of a time. Finally, I want to get my French back up to the level it used to be at (close to bilingual). I'm good at languages, but I was never totally fluent and so when I don't use it, I lose it.
  • Spanish. I'm back on track with French and going all the way this time, but a part of me can't wait to turn to the next language. After that I will return to Japanese -- hopefully on site.
  • I just did a Latin midterm, and while Latin is fun (very logical), I would probably not be doing it except that is is easy and at least tangetially related to my field. Chinese (any dialect, though I began a bit of Mandarin) would be my first choice (it is very beautiful, spoken or written), challenged only by my guilt at my lack of French, despite 6 years wasted when I was a kid.
  • Japanese, because I find the culture fascinating Hebrew, because then all my religious upbringing would make more sense Russian, because after 9 years of study and 2 trips I really should have learned more
  • Portugese. Truthfully, I hadn't ever thought much about Portugese until I heard it spoken (just recently). I was literally mesmerized. It's an incredibly beautiful language.
  • Portuguese* argh.
  • Mandarin -- I've studied it for 2 semesters and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface. I look forward to the day that I can give a passing translation of journal articles. Cantonese -- I live in Chinatown and Cantonese is the most common language. I would love to hear what the locals are saying to each other about the tourists.
  • Mandarin! Language of the future. But Spanish will do me in a pinch.
  • French is most often the language that I'm annoyed by because I don't know it, so that would be the most useful to me. Just choosing which one I'd most want to take, though, I'd have to go with Arabic or Japanese. It'd also be nice to remember a lot more of the Latin, Greek, and Italian I've taken...
  • All the comments on the beauty of Portuguese make me laugh, since I have a different image sort of implanted in my brain. I dated this Portuguese guy for a bit in high school, and, suffice to say, his mom wasn't happy about this since I wasn't Portuguese and I was a year older than him and OMGWTFBBQ. (In retrospect she was probably trying to do me a favour, her son was an ass who turned into a stalker when we broke up). Anyhoo, one time she came home while I was over, and she chased me outside and stood in the street screaming at me while I drove away. Portuguese has never really been a beautiful language for me after that. Of course, now my little sister is dating a Portuguese guy, and taking courses in the language. I really should get over my irrational tendency to dislike languages and entire countries if one of their citizens or descendants really pisses me off. ;)
  • Icelandic.
  • Coyote. I love how they sing.
  • Why not Klingon? I remember having read that more people are now fluent in Klingon than in Esperanto or any of the other minor artificial 'international' languages.
  • Would like to learn Welsh and Spanish, and if my life was magically extended by a few decades Scots Gaelic, Russian and Arabic too. The Celtic languages are for access to some beautiful culture (and for surprising travellers on the train to my brother's place near Llandudno), the others for their utility first and foremost, but obviously you get the bonus of loads of fun stuff too. I make my living because of learning a second language (Mandarin) and I do be lurving thay world of words.
  • Salish, the local native language, with many dialects.
  • I need to learn more German, so I can understand my wife better and talk to the other half of my family on an equal footing.
  • dj, a friend of mine is married to an Austrian and speaks only minimal German. She's learning German now, not for her benefit but so she speak to their two-year-old daughter in German and get her immersed in the language. Her in-laws speak no English at all.
  • L33T.
  • German, because Germans are so much fun to imitate (the guttural sounds and other tonal harshnesses, plus the "romance" in the image of the loner existentialist Berliner smoking a filterless cigarette beneath a slate-gray sky). Also because those words they make by smushing bunches of shorter words together are totally cool.
  • Europeanse (pronounced "Euro-pee-en-say"). It's like gibberish, but foriegn! ("Europeanse. Esa gusto que gibberoso, aber foreigno!") I took German in high school, and can barely remember any. I learned Spanish for a bit by dating a Spanish girl who spoke little English. Italian seems fun to learn. Arabic seems like it could be cool, but the non-Roman alphabet intimidates me. Right now I know about enough to get into a fight in five or six languages, and enough to get food and directions in at least four. I'd like to actually learn to speak one of them someday.
  • French is most often the language that I'm annoyed by because I don't know it, so that would be the most useful to me. This is how I feel about Ancient Greek. Actually, I mostly feel frustrated that I can't pronounce it, even. Or, I did feel that way, but then i started studying it. Then I put it down, because I was trying to learn it on my own and at some point I just wanted to have someone to ask questions to. Latin would also be nice. Or, really, anything.
  • Cantonese- Because after learning some Mandarin, GuanDong Hua just sounds funny to me. Farsi- A friend taught me how to say "eat of my ass" in Farsi and I've been hooked ever since. On Farsi, that is. Papiamento- A Spanish/ Portuguese/ Dutch/ English /African(?) dialect from the ABC islands that just sounds amazing when spoken.
  • JavaScript, which I am already learning together with my son. Natural languages: Icelandic and then German or Spanish.
  • Why Icelandic? Because of the literature, and because it's the Scandinavian (using that term guardedly) language I don't yet understand. Why German? Because I know Scandinavian languages and English, which will make it easy to learn. Why Spanish? So I can woo the wimmin! Why JavaScript? It's an easy portal into the world of computer programming, which will make me rich!
  • Mandarin -- I've studied it for 2 semesters and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface. I look forward to the day that I can give a passing translation of journal articles. Mandarin-English translation is very difficult. I'm a native Mandarin speaker but still found an intermediate-level translation class quite a challenge. It gave me doubts about my fluency in either language. The most important lesson I learned is that literal word-by-word translation rarely works.
  • I reckon it took me three years before I could hold anything remotely resembling a coversation in Mandarin. Funnily enough kenshin I reckon I'm better at Chinese-English textual translation than I am at speaking now - even though I live in China I spend all day working at home on my own and speak Chinese less than I used to. I'm glad that translation isn't too easy though - or software would soon have me out of a job!
  • Silbo. Because it would be cool and I visited the island La Gomera twice already and liked it very much.
  • Anything. I feel really stupid sometimes because I can only speak English. I took German in high school, but our teacher was fairly lackadaisacal, and (this being high school) we thought that wasn't a bad thing. So I hardly know anything. Study hard, kids! I don't seem to have a major problem absorbing languages, or words, at least, so I do want to take a class someday. It's lame, I know - "oh, I'll take a class." I'm not going to travel the world or marry someone exotic, I just find it interesting.
  • I'll believe in artificial intelligence when they make a Chinese-English translation software that works.
  • Literal translation* to English is much easier with Chinese than it is with Latin, because the word order and grammar are more similar, even if the words themselves are not. I think that's why I think of Chinese as easier - you may be able to guess many Latin words from an English descendant, but it is harder to make sense of what they are trying to do in the sentance because the grammar is so twisted. I've only read either at the picture book level (forgotten my Chinese now, though I knew several dozens of characters), but Latin you have to sit there taking the sentance apart, whereas in Chinese, you just read the syllables from beginnning to end and you have your sentance. I was reading modern Chinese with Western punctuation though (like spaces between words) - classical or differently punctuated would be another matter altogether. *By literal, I mean near literal - translating words and phrases as they would be understood, not the individual components of compound words that have a different meaning together. But I always prefer my translation a little more literal than elegant in English - it brings more of the original idiom/sound/rhythm through.
  • I'd love to learn sign language.
  • I learned a bit (of AUSLAN and BSL) and was going to keep it up but ... got distracted. My teacher was way hot too! Hmmm should get into that ...
  • i took eight friggin' years of spanish -- four in high school, four in college -- and i'm moving into the heart of d.c.'s latino neighborhood and I STILL CAN'T SPEAK SPANISH. *sigh* some brains pick it up, mine can't.
  • yeah mickey isn't sign language beautiful? gallaudet university is here and i often see students speaking on the subway. it's lovely to watch, so expressive!
  • I took some German in college, but understand very little. Wish I'd studied a bit harder. Spanish, Japanese, sign language (good one, Mickey).
  • I've studied French, Latin, Gaelic and a course in ASL. Can't converse in any although I can cuss in French, due to proximity. I am adept, now, at deciphering those and many languages in written form and would love to study more Latin, if there was any resources available anymore near me.
  • SideDish, I grew up in DC so I've seen those same kids. Though I don't know sign language, I'm fascinated by it, especially since there must be huge possibilities for slang, weird puns, etc. My language goals: the realistic/useful one is Russian, since it's the operatic language I don't yet know. More wistful yearnings include Japanese (for the culture and the people) and Ancient Greek (seems I share a Homer fetish with many monkeys.)
  • Russian... last time I tried I wasn't focused, and I think all I've retained is the alphabet (on a Sesame Street level, minus the singing). I'd love to have a reason to use my German more. many Germans I've met were very interested in why I'd chosen to learn their language, and made efforts to welcome me. Sign language would be very cool. I've picked up bits and pieces, and can finger spell (handy when communicating across a crowded room, or for charming a deaf person when you can spell your name or say thank you). Chinese, Japanese and Korean would be wonderful just for the insight into the cultures. Spanish of course... if I'd ever known in advance I'd be in Texas, I'd have studied Spanish.
  • German, because Germans are so much fun to imitate ... A quote from my mother: "German is such a spitty language!" :-)
  • I'm currently teaching myself Piedmontese because it's a charmingly crazy language (a sort of cross between French and Italian but with quirks all of its own) and not that many people speak it any more. I'm hopefully starting Japanese lessons in a couple of weeks, because I don't at the moment speak any languages that don't use Roman script and I wanted to try something different, and conveniently my neighbour happens to be a Japanese teacher. After that, probably Mandarin and Russian. And I've always wanted to learn to read some of the ancient scripts: Sanskrit, hieroglyphics, Cuneiform and so on. Sir Richard Burton, who spoke twenty-five languages and an additional fifteen dialects fluently, is my all-time hero.
  • mothninja, you've inspired me to learn Piedmontese. I'm currently learning French in school, and I would love to learn German and Greek (or ancient Greek, for that matter. I know a tiny bit (the first five lines of Homer's Odyssey) but that's about it). Sign language has always appealed to me for some reason (though the only thing I can say is 'nuclear power plant').
  • French, Gaelic, Russian, Arabic, German, Italian...in that order. Lovely languages, all, but I'm afraid I've no head for any of them.
  • Hey buddy, you learn all those and you can ask for head from 72% of the female population of the world.
  • Mandarin, because I love the way it sounds. Second choice would be Gaelic or Welsh, for the same reason.
  • Lojban looks interesting.
  • I'd love to learn a Native American or Australian language. ASL would also be great. Russian. Any language with that many consonants in a row just has to be cool! Russian is my favorite language (aside from English), and I urge anyone even faintly interested to give it a try. It's extremely satisfying to speak, and they have both great curse words and great poetry. What more can you ask for? It is not, however, the champion of consonants-in-a-row. For that, you have to go to the Caucasus, where consonants rule and some languages (eg, Kabardian) are said to have only a single vowel -- although that is disputed here -- or to the Pacific Northwest (from the linked article: "those celebrated Bella Coola or Wishram jawbreakers, which sound a bit as though the speaker was trying to whisper and eat granola at the same time"). Sample words from Georgian (the best-known language of the Caucasus): brts'qinwa 'to shine'; gnde 'edge'; janmrteli 'healthy'; khelmdzghwaneli 'leader'; mts'vertneli 'trainer'; zhghvlem 'you knead'; skhdoma 'meeting'; varsk'vlavi 'star.'
  • Spanish, because I will eventually be inheriting a house in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico. It is a wonderful town, and I don't want to sell the vacation/retirement house, but I despair of being able to keep it up or rented without being able to speak the local language. Mandarin Chinese, because you can't really overestimate the importance of China to the world economic future, and because my lovely daughter is from there.
  • I would love to learn Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, or Italian. Of course, I could just try and attain fluency in Spanish since I'll have much more opportunities to practice that here in No. Cal.
  • *sigh* many more opportunities. I could also work on my English, I suppose.
  • I took Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Greek in college. Spanish is my best language, but I'm not fluent in it; it's gotten very rusty. I would love to be competent in Italian and Latin. I've always wanted to learn: *Irish Gaelic (that ancestral thing; my family came from Ireland) *Portuguese, since it's similar to Spanish *French, although I have a hard time with it because what you read is not what you say *Catalunyan (those romance lanuages!) *Inuktitut/Inuit. Why not?
  • I always prefer my translation a little more literal than elegant in English - it brings more of the original idiom/sound/rhythm through. True, that's why literal works better in translating Chinese poetry and older works of fiction, which professional storytellers read to public audiences at the time. In contrast, translating modern business/science writings demands precision if not elegance, so the literal approach doesn't work as well.
  • Irish Gaelic, for the ancestral thing. I've always wanted to learn it & never have. I took French in high school and college and lived in Spain in the middle, with the result that I ended up speaking a strangely accented patois that was neither really Spanish or French. Spench, maybe, or Franish. Now I've even lost that through attrition and laziness - I wish I spoke fluent Spanish, it would be very helpful.
  • Irish Gaelic. So the Anglo-Saxons won't know what I'm saying about them. I've actually probably already got that covered with Japanese, but Gaelic seems like the right way to do it.
  • Korean.
  • I took German for three years in high school, so I am not completely unfamiliar with the language. I find the supposed harshness of German pronunciation to be an unfair generalisation, though that could just be that my wife's region has a much softer accent than the South and Eastern parts.
  • Can anyone recommend any online resources for studying Celtic languages?
  • Homunculus, I've bookmarked this Welsh course but haven't tried it yet. Similar story with this resource for Gaelic. Both look pretty good quality at first blush and are associated with reputable bodies.
  • New languages: Japanese, Russian and Korean. But I'd like to improve my Welsh, Chinese and maybe ASL too. Written Welsh is a very nice language - it's at about the right level of difficulty for learners to pick it up easily. Of course the usefulness can be disputed(especially for a deaf person living in Sweden...) but it's a fun language to learn. As for online resources for welsh.. the link Abiezer_Coppe giveis a good one. There are also the BBC page for learners and the cheat sheets at Clwb Malu Cachu.
  • French, because so many of the novels I've read or plan to read were written in this language.
  • Thanks!
  • How about online resources for Mandarin? There must be many, anyone used any?
  • this is perhaps the best general purpose introduction to irish gaelic* i've found on the web. note that the main site is a rather deep shade of green. *as opposed to scots gaelic, which is the subject of the resource abiezer links to. the differences are not huge - i can read scots gaelic and it just looks a bit strange to me; i can understand scots gaelic reasonably well and can make myself understood.
  • Not so hot there homunculus. I'm a member of this forum where you can get help as a learner, and the BBC has a beginner's course which I'm sure you can find, but a similar posting on those forums I just mentioned turned up mainly dross. Come to Beijing for a holiday and I'll get a friend to do language exchange with you.
  • Thanks, Abiezer. Alas, I can't travel anytime soon, and I doubt I'll ever learn Mandarin, as much as I enjoy listening to it. Back on Gaelic/Welsh, are there any Celtic language films with English subtitles anyone recommends? Obviously there are penty of Mandarin films with English subtitles on DVD to watch and listen to, but I'm not familiar with any films in Gaelic or Welsh.
  • I remember seeing a great film (mostly) in Irish about 1798 on BBC2 many years back but my Google skills seems lacking, though they did stumble across this Irish government portal which looks like a rich resource. Oh, I just remembered - I think the movie was actually the mini-series 'The Year of the French' a Euro co-production, with many Irish scenes and a chance to brush up your French as well. I've also seen a fairly silly full length feature in Scots Gaelic that was a (very) low budget sword and sorcery effort. Welsh stuff should be easier, try S4C's (Welsh TV) website - they support a lot of film. Don't know if long running Welsh soap opera 'Pobol y Cwm' is available subtitled but I bet that would be a great learning tool.
  • for movies, i'd check out entries to this festival. there's also a rather good irish language soap opera called "ros na run", but web searches haven't thrown up any dvds of it. a polite request on soc.culture.irish might yield results. the brythonic languages (welsh, cornish, and breton) are almost a complete mystery to me, much as i'd like to read or speak them. i think the fork from goidelic happened so long ago that the shared parts of the languages are obvious only to dedicated linguists.
  • Though it is not widely known yet, I believe this to be one of the most eloquent poems written in the twentieth century: Going Home (A' Dol Dhachaidh) Tomorrow I shall go home to my island trying to put a world into forgetfulness. I will lift a fisfull of its earth in my hands or I will sit on a hillock of the mind warching 'the shepherd at his sheep.' There will arise (I presume) a thrush. A dawn or two will break. There will be a boat lying in the glitter of the western sun: and water running through the world of similes of my intelligence. But I will be thinking (in spite of that) of the great fire at the back of our thoughts, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and I will hear in a room by myself a ghost ot two ceaselessly moving, the ghost of each error, the ghost of each guilt, the ghost of each time I walked past a wounded man on a stony road, the ghost of nothingness scrutinizing my dumb room with distant face, till the island becomes an ark rising and falling on a great sea and I not knowing whether the dove will return and men talking and talking to each other and the rainbow of forgiveness in their tears. --Iain Crichton Smith (Iain Mac a' Ghobhainn) trans from Scottush Gaekic by the author
  • That is fantastic beeswacky - I've seen Crichton Smith's work in a couple of anthologies, but never read that piece. It puts me in mind of this by Sorley MacLean: (from A' Bheinn air Chall The Lost Mountain) Because Vietnam and Ulster are heaps on Auschwitz of the bones, and the fresh rich trees pins on mountains of pain. In what eternity of the mind will South America or Belsen be put with the sun on Sgurr Urain and its ridges cut in snow? I bought an anthology of Sorley's poems when I was a lad on holiday in Wester Ross and I've carried it with me ever since. He translates his own work and would be a good read for a learner if only for the inspiration.
  • That's amazing -- I thought of Maclean too when I read beeswacky's wonderful quote, and I too have carried around a collection of his for years -- in my case the bilingual Reothairt is Contraigh (Spring Tide and Neap Tide). For those who don't know him, here are a couple of web pages with info: 1, 2. And here's a couple of short poems I'm fond of, a quatrain from the early '40s called "Edinburgh" (Dùn-éideann in the original): Often when I called Edinburgh a grey town without darting sun, it would light up with your beauty, a refulgent, white-starred town. (Tric 's mi gabhail air Dùn-éideann baile glas gun ghathadh gréine, 's ann a lasadh e le d' bhòidhche, baile lòghmor geal-reultach.) And a poem from around 1970: SPRING TIDE Again and again when I am broken my thought comes on you when you were young, and the incomprehensible ocean fills with floodtide and a thousand sails. The shore of trouble is hidden with its reefs and the wrack of grief, and the unbreaking wave strikes about my feet with a silken rubbing. How did the springtide not last, the springtide more golden to me than to the birds, and how did I lose its sucoour, ebbing drop by drop of grief? The deeply sad poem "Hallaig," with its epigraph "Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig," is too long to quote but I urge you to read it if you can find a copy. I heard the author read it on the radio years ago and it sent shivers up my spine.
  • launguagehat - I linked to a really nice on-line version of Hallaig in a comment on the 'Poetry makes a comeback thread'. The collection I have is O Choille gu Bearradh which won Sorley the Queen's Award for Poetry. Seumas Heaney has is right on the back cover blurb to that - Sorley's poems are "keys or passwords admitting one to a deeper knowledge, to a finer perception.'
  • Great! Here's the direct link to "Hallaig" for those who don't feel like going via the other thread.
  • Cá Bhfuil Na Gaeilg eoirí? (Both links via MeFi.)
  • Interesting links, homunculus. I received an Esperanto-English dictionary and phrasebook with some grammar lessons in it for Xmas. Now I can watch Incubus without having to read the mandatory subtitles! Long live Milos Milos!
  • The most profoundly perverse part of all this is that modern Irish writers are particularly honoured for their surpassing command of the English language. Which is the very sort of thing that makes one ready to place credence in those all-too-human gods of the ancients.
  • My question has been answered on the blue. Thanks, Abiezer.
  • hom - I also found the site of what was the first ever Gaelic film that I mentioned having seen above.It was sadly a pretty dire effort, though the film-maker seems like a really interesting guy, as is the story about its making. The director used four lads from a gang in Drumchapel who were up in the Highlands rebuilding a ruined village. They couldn't speak Gaelic so delivered their lines phonetically. The rest of the cast included native speakers, I think.
  • grand if you want all your vowels abused. but sure, that's part of what ye came for.
  • I love it when you abuse my vowels, Roryk.
  • Onan's sin was not masturbation - he was happy to have sex with his brother's wife, but he refused to impregnate her. But I guess "Coitus Interruptus Meadow" is not as catchy.
  • I don't think the Bible is explicit about how Onan spilt his seed. That said, I'll take Coitus Interruptus Meadow over Masturbation Meadow any day of the week.
  • It translates to Onan Meadow. They should get over themselves.
  • Before they get IT all over themselves. Such a persistent stain... *readies damp cloth*
  • I once visited a village called Wanking-in-the-Hedge* *may not be true
  • That's not so far south of Swift-One-off-the-Wrist, isn't it?
  • Also, Welsh is not Gaelic. Bad web portal subs.
  • Edenics
  • Seachd will be out on DVD in the UK in February. I hope it comes to the US at some point.
  • TG4 (Telifis na Gaeltachta, broadcast channel number 4 in Ireland) has quite a lot of content available online at tg4.tv. There's program information here.
  • lol ur a luzer d00d.
  • Colin and Cumberland. Language games in Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh (North and South).
  • Now there's a funny thing. For ages I've had this funny voice in my head which keeps saying things like 'Matar a todos; yo soy Dios: todos deben morir.' Unfortunately I don't speak Italian. Maybe one day I'll take lessons.
  • And they couldn't figure out why their subscriptions had doubled...
  • Sehr gut!