Quote:
Originally Posted by Yggdrasil
Actually, Zay, I'd say the hardest language to learn for any person on Earth would be Basque. After countless decades of linguistic investigation, analyzing everything from the Vedas to Sumerian to Japanese, it has been determined that there are absolutely no languages on the face of the earth related to Basque.
It's actually believed Basque is the last remaining language of pre Indo-European origin in Europe.
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Interesting idea. Out of curiosity, have you read anything about possible links between the Etruscans and the Basques? I don't mean to patronize anybody, but in case you didn't know, the Etruscans were a tribe situated on the mid-northern Italian peninsula (not
terribly far from northern Spain...) -- they eventually got wiped out by the Romans, c. 400-500 BC. They spoke a thus-unidentified language called... Etruscan. It seems there may have been a "native" language family in Europe long before any Indo-Europeans inhabited the continent.
Still, are we completely throwing away the idea of Mandarin? I've not even tried to delve into it, but I know people who do speak it, and they say it is next to fucking impossible to comprehend until you've studied it consistently for 2 years. I suppose these Caucasian languages may be very hard for a native Anglophone, but from what I know, they at least use a
phonetic alphabet...