linguoboy wrote:
Sobekhotep wrote:
Aeetlrcreejl wrote:
I guess I should learn Tonkawa, Comanche, or Lipan Apache. Of those, the only one that isn't extinct is Comanche.
Comanche is cool. Although I have no clue what a voicless/devoiced vowel could be...
Japanese is full of them. English has them, too: When you whisper, every sound you make is devoiced.
Oh, that's what a voiceless vowel is! OK, I can do those.
dtp883 wrote:
This is going to make me sound bad, but why do most of you want to learn languages that have less than 2000 speakers? I mean unless you were to move somewhere where it is spoken, or to marry someone who speaks it, or a linguist doing research, or what not, it seems pretty useless. Especially when languages such as French or Japanese are claimed to raise your paycheck while obscure Native American languages wouldn't.
And if you learn a language like that it would be more likely for you to forget it. I don't understand why you'd want to expend time on something you would use rarely, and wouldn't really help you in life.
*I guess I could understand it if it wasn't a primary focus.
I'm with you. As cool as it would be for me to be able to speak Winnebago or Menominee there's no realistic use for it. That's precisely why I'm
not going to learn any of those Native American languages since I'd never use any anyway.
All the languages I'm committed to learning I will use regularly.