Quote:
Originally Posted by static_void
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...
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Well, no offense taken; you raised an interesting point. I know that there have been many artifacts found in ancestral Etruscan lands engraved with what seems to be an alphabetic script, as of yet barely readable. It seems that although the Etruscans had Near-Eastern genetics (Anatolian), they spoke an Indo European tongue.
I looked it up, and it seems that other pre Indo-European languages in Europe, like Iberian, were completely unrelated to Basque, yet neither were Indo-European. Odd...
Anyways, I was talking to a friend about Chinese (Mandarin to be precise), and it seems that after you get over their script, it's a relatively easy language to learn. The grammar is incredibly simple: There are no tenses, no genders, nor a system for differentiating amounts (singular, plural).
But, on the other hand, they have a set of grammatical rules different from our own.