Languages

[St. Jimmy]

I understand that Finnish has something like 15 noun cases.

Finnish is from another planet. Like Basque. They're remains from peoples who were around before the influence of Indo-European (which is a long time ago).

As for Esperanto, I think it's heavily biased towards Spanish (its creator is Spanish), just like "y" in the phonetic alphabet is like the "u" in "hue" (sort of, Enlgish doesn't really have it), because the creator of the phonetic alphabet was Danish.

[St. Jimmy]

I'm deaf in one ear, but I don't know either ASL or ESL.

Me too in my right ear (well partly, on the useful frequencies). Which ear might I ask? (purely out of curiosity, plus if I meet enough like-eared people I might start up some statistics if I get bored some day. Also It's not enough of a problem to bother with sign language although I do know this one

\m/^^\m/

[Mordread]

I'm deaf in one ear, but I don't know either ASL or ESL.

Me too in my right ear (well partly, on the useful frequencies). Which ear might I ask? (purely out of curiosity, plus if I meet enough like-eared people I might start up some statistics if I get bored some day. Also It's not enough of a problem to bother with sign language although I do know this one

\m/^^\m/

Left ear.

Mostly mechanical damage due to an abundance of ear infections when I was younger - I've had four tympanoplastis and it's never been the same since.

[Dov]

St. Jimmy wrote:

As for Esperanto, I think it's heavily biased towards Spanish (its creator is Spanish), just like "y" in the phonetic alphabet is like the "u" in "hue" (sort of, Enlgish doesn't really have it), because the creator of the phonetic alphabet was Danish.

Actually, founder of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, was Polish. He grew up in a town where four languages were spoken and the politics between them was complex. As a Yiddish speaker his native language was at the bottom of the social pecking order. This is one of the reasons that he favored cultural and religious neutrality in an auxillary language.

He was fond of Latin and at one time thought Latin should be revived as a lingua franca. He decided in favor of his constructed language because Latin would be too hard for the working classes to learn. However, 75% of the word roots in Esperanto are Latin in origin.

[St. Jimmy]

I'm deaf in one ear, but I don't know either ASL or ESL.

Me too in my right ear (well partly, on the useful frequencies). Which ear might I ask? (purely out of curiosity, plus if I meet enough like-eared people I might start up some statistics if I get bored some day. Also It's not enough of a problem to bother with sign language although I do know this one

\m/^^\m/

Left ear.

Mostly mechanical damage due to an abundance of ear infections when I was younger - I've had four tympanoplastis and it's never been the same since.

Mine was nerve damage caused by encephalitis a year ago. It gave me meningitis as well, and the two together caused the cephalo-spinal liquid in my head to exert pressure on the nerve. Nasty stuff.