Aspies For Freedom

I Have some interest in languages and would like to resuem study at some point in Irish Gaelic And Welsh. I've also studied etymolgoy a bit and my favourite historical atefact is the Rosetta stone

I like Japanese and Latin, and recently began to study Spanish. I can sound out some Greek words too, from learning Classics at school and uni, but I never learnt Greek. There is so much more I would love to learn if I had time. :wink:

The funny thing is, whenever I say I want to learn a new Language, people say "WHY?" as though it is silly or something. Nowadays they expect you to say "because I want to travel" or something like that. They don't expect you to say "because I want to learn more words."

I keep a little book that whenever I see someone who is from another country or something I can ask them to do a language exchange with me. That way I can teach them some Latin and Japanese and they can teach me whatever they know. Things like how to count 1-10 etc.

I heard that counting one to ten is the best way to tell which other languages the words are most closely related to. Because they hardly ever change with outside influence. :grin:

By "sound out" I do mean much less than a perfect rendition - or even probably a good rendition. I mean more like, recognise the letters and know from that what names they are talking about -- or recognise words in dictionary. I know a Greek friend of mine said the same, when he was trying to apply modern pronounciations to ancient Greek words. Although of course, no-one can know ABSOLUTELY for certain how these languages sounded so many years ago.

Apart from English, I speak French, Irish, a little Basque and Spanish, and am now pretty good at Swedish. Would like to learn Dutch at some stage too.

I've always been interested in Languages. I want to learn to speak Spanish Fluently. I would like to learn sign Language, I might learn Latin in the future, i find it very interesting that lots of Languages are based on latin. When I got bored in the toilet when I was a kid.I would read the Labels on Shampoo bottles in the different Languages comparing the words. I like reading anything that has links to English and look for similar words.

I am superbly interested in foreign languages, and have studied over 200 of them.  Not fluent in any of them, though.

Specifically, my interests are currently the languages (and general culture) of the 'Stans (Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh, etc.)

Tim