I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.
As someone with a background in linguistics, my jimmies are indeed rustled.
Does Russian have stricter grammar syntax than German? I was a bit puzzled by the comparison made above
IDK, comparing Javascript to English while Java to German seems to either overblow the value of javascript or diminish the value of English.
Yeah German isn’t nearly as bad as Java either. Also what is asm? Phoenetic script?
How so? Except the first sentence which is obviously not serious, I would agree with all linguistic statements or at least not disagree with any.
For one, Latin has more fancy rules than French. I guess the subjunctive is probably something English speakers might consider fancy, but Latin has that too. Latin has more times that are conjugations of the core verb (rather than needing auxiliary verbs), has grammatical cases (like German, but two more if you include vocative) and, idk, also just feels fancier in general.
I’ll admit it’s been years since I actually read any Latin and that I only have a surface level understanding of all languages mentioned except for French, but this post reads like it’s about the stereotypes of the countries rather than being about the languages themselves.
First, I wouldn’t count the vocative but let’s not get into this debate. Counting cases, Russian wins until you include other balto slavic languages or even Uralic ones.
Fancy is a very subjective term. Auxiliary verbs are fancy in their own way. From an orthographical viewpoint, French is quite fancy with all the silent letters, the way vocals are pronounced and stuff. French had like one spelling “reform” and it was like let’s make it more obvious we decent from Latin. Grammar wise it’s just like the other romance languages from what I know. They once got rid of the silent <s> and put a “gravestone” on the letter before (^) that has no other meaning than here was a silent s. Wouldn’t you call that fancy? Who would call it fancy?
MwaMoi!Haha I decline your proposal not to get into that debate: the vocative is a grammatical case. Maybe not every noun can be put in the vocative, but it’s definitely one of the cases. Even the locative is a case, even though only a couple of nouns use it.
To be clear, in general the vocative is a case eg in Czech and other balto slavic languages (except eg standard Russian while colloquial Russian is developing a new unrelated one).
In Latin tho, it’s more a relict. Other cases have relicts, too, still I wouldn’t say Latin has the locative.
I would argue that being a relict is a spectrum. Technically, it is a case with many syncretism to nominative, since it is obligatory for those nouns. In the context of LAtiN hAs sOo0 ManY cAsES, it’s not.
The Ohio State University seems to think these are both cases: https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program/Grammar/Cases/latin-case .
and there are vestiges of a seventh, the Locative.
I called it relicts but it’s basically what I said. Maybe vestiges is the better word in English, in German we say “Relikte”.
Meh, as a native Dutch speaker auxiliary verbs feel really utilitarian to me, and not particularly fancy - like you said, that’s highly subjective.
As for cases, I didn’t say Latin or German had the most, but just that I think they’re fancy and that Latin has them while French doesn’t.
So you speak a V2 language like me? I’m German btw. Let me give you an outside perspective on auxiliary verbs in continental western Germanic languages:
The verb comes in second position (hence V2). Using an auxiliary verb moves the content verb to the very end of the sentence. It totally messes with the syntax.
But that’s besides my point. My point wasn’t that French auxiliary verbs are fancy but that fancy can me many things, in French it’s the spelling and pronunciation. Cases aren’t fancy, at least not the German or Latin ones. The slavic cases are a different story, in my objective opinion.
Latin has more rules, but they’re more utilitarian than fancy. Latin rules are there to make sure you understand exactly what is being said. French rules are there to make everything elegant and confusing, like high fashion.
I think the first sentence is probably enough to make anyone not afflicted with a eurocentric brain want to palm some face.
I think excusing it as a “not serious” statement is dangerous, as a lot of people even on Lemmy won’t second guess it.
The belief that the west is the origin of all science and culture is surprisingly pervasive, especially in the tech industry.
“The root of all modern languages” is a heck of a thing to say about Latin, and I’m pretty sure several billion people haven’t quite gotten that memo. Calling a chunk of Europe and a thin slice of Africa “the entire Universe” is also a spicy take. Come for the programmer humor, recoil in disgust for the rampant ethnocentrism, I guess.
I don’t disagree but I would still give the benefit of a doubt that “the whole universe” is such an exaggeration that it makes the overstatement obvious. But it would also be read as a praise. Overall, I wouldn’t take it all to seriously. Made me laugh but I also see the eurocentrism and it’s good to be aware of it.
I mean, French is vulgar Latin at best. And even if it wasn’t obviously spoken by all sorts of French people, elites or not, it’s also the official language of a bunch of other countries, from Monaco to Niger. “Elites and certain circles” is a very weird read, which I’m guessing is based on US stereotypes on the French? I don’t even think the British would commit to associating the French with elitism.
Russian speakers being “mostly autoritarian left” is also… kind of a lot to assume? I’m not even getting into that one further. I don’t know if the Esperanto one checks out, either. “Esperanto speaker” is the type of group, and this is true, whose wikipedia page doesn’t include statistics but instead just a list of names. Which is hilarious, but maybe not a great Python analogue. It may still be the best pairing there, because to my knowledge English speakers aren’t any worse at speaking English than the speakers of any other language. They are more monolingual, though.
It just all sounds extremely anglocentric to me, which is what it is, I suppose, but it really messes with the joke if you’re joking about languages specifically. One could do better with this concept, I think.
I think the elitism regards of French isn’t about French native speakers but about second language learners. French was the lingua franca in Europe for quite a while and using French loan words makes you sound more fancy and eloquent in many languages (compare “adult” with “grownup” which is a Latin loan word but I can’t think of a real example so I hope no one will notice).
The Russian bit I totally agree. Esperanto vs python is quite a leap, I agree. Showing a list (that’s probably not conclusive but still) is telling when compared to the go to beginners programming language. Still there are parallels in the design and intention. No comparison is ever perfect.
All in all it’s not perfect but as a joke, it works for me. Sure, it’s not unbiased but if not taken too seriously, I can laugh about it, and I can over analyze it for fun so win win for me.
Yeah, but that’s my point. The author clearly isn’t thinking about the hundreds of millions of native French speakers around the world, they’re an American thinking the word “mutton” sounds fancier than “sheep”… in English.
Which yeah, okay, that’s their cultural upbringing causing that, but then maybe don’t make a joke entirely predicated on making sharp observations about how languages work and aimed specifically at nerds. I can only ever go “it’s funny because it’s true” or be extremely judgmental of your incorrect assumptions about how languages work here.
your incorrect assumptions
Why make it about me? I was more or less playing devil’s advocate, saying if not taken seriously it’s funny.
I would be more likely to agree with you if you put “OP’s assumption”. Your phrasing makes me want to double down on my original position.
That’s just a general recommendation for discussions in general, online and offline. I learned a thing or two about my biases and perspectives here. Btw I’m German and that part resonated with me from my little experience with JAVA and my experience in learning about my native language and teaching it to others.
Oh, sorry, you misunderstood, I didn’t mean you specifically, I mean you as in “why would you ever do this”, as in “why would anybody ever do this”.
Languages, as we’ve established, are complicated.
It’s kinda funny, I’m Flemish and a lot of French loan words (ambriage, merci, nondedju = nom de dieu to name a few) are mainly used in dialect, and therefore don’t make you sounds sophisticated or worldly at all.
From what I know it’s similar in Swiss German (with words like merci and velo (bike)). I don’t know about Fleming but Swiss embraces their dialects so it isn’t stigmatized either
Heh, we use velo as well. And yeah, we don’t really stigmatise dialects that much either, though depending on how much dialect you use people might find it unprofessional.
About Esperanto, since it’s not a national language (intentionally so) it’s hard to do a census of speakers.
Also, to what level is considered “speaking Esperanto”? Taking the Duolingo course? Having it as a “mother tongue” where both parents speak it in a household in order to communicate? These are both probably countable, and produce wildly different numbers.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think that’s the reason. I also think those numbers may be different but they may both be indistinguishable from zero when plotted against natural languages. You’re right about it being hard to define what counts as a “Esperanto speaker”. I can’t decide if that makes the Python comparison better or worse, though.
Yeah, I do not think Python is a very good comparison.
I was thinking more like Clojure:
- Enthusiastic and friendly geeks trying to push their language on the world trying to make it a better place. They are both definitely not a little cultish!
- Language intended to be simple to learn with a limited and regular vocabulary, but can handle complicated work with ease.
- They both say that learning their language will make your mind better able to do other languages.
- A bridge between languages. Vanilla Clojure runs on the JVM and can invoke Java commands. But it has also been built on other platforms like JavaScript (ClojureScript), .NET (CLR), Python (Basilisp), BASH (Babashka), and others I think.
- The parts of both languages can be broken up, mixed, and matched, and used for other parts. In Esperanto, the fundamental elements can be broken down and made into other words. In Clojure, you’ve got functions and lists - and higher order functions that work on functions and lists, and lists of functions, and functions of lists.
- Did I mention: Friendly & welcoming geeks that lo-o-o-ove newbies! Seriously, both Clojure nerds and Esperanto nerds are unnaturally nice and would like to welcome you to the club. They’ve got tons of free resources for you to learn it.
Honestly, I think both are right. Both are simple languages that expand your way of thinking, and are probably both worth learning, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I suspect there’s more people who speak Python fluently than Esperanto. So that comparison sits very wrong with me. The rest was funny :)
Esperanto always struck me as more perl-like with each part of speech having its own suffix like perl has $ for scalars, @ for arrays, and % for hashes. Though perl is probably more like a bunch of pidgins…
Yeah, I was about to say.
Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.
PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.
Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.
Esperanto’s equivalent would probably be Haskell.
Python is probably more like Spanish. Very easy basics, but then people from different regions of where it’s has spread out barely understand each other
It’s probably a similar learning speed
Nobody mentioned number of speakers though
No, but the adoption rate is likely related to how useful the language is?
Is this post sane-washing Russia? What’s left about Russia under Putin? Overall funny, though
It’s a post by the lemmy dev, so yeah that’s a given
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The USSR was bad but it wasn’t communist. For that it would have had to have been stateless and classless, definitionally.
There is such thing as an Authoritarian Left.
I thought the political compass was itself just a popular perspective? It’s is a gross oversimplification of the ideas involved. Find me two leftists who even agree on what’s the farthest left.
I’m not sure it is. Like, yes, it does exist in the Left/Right, Auth/Lib political compass, but that’s just a model. The stance has some inherent contradictions.
And so does Right/Lib, for that matter. “Fiscally conservative/socially liberal” is a nonsense position, and those taking it tend to just be conservative in practice.
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Is it was so great, why did most of the conquered nations run west as fast as they could as soon as they could? Must have been because the USSR was so ‘progressive’.
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The Soviet people voted overwhelmingly in favor of retaining the Soviet Union, albiet with reforms, in a referendum that was ignored when the leaders of the USSR’s constituent republics agreed behind closed doors to dissolve the nation.
The referendum (the only one they ever had) with it being in 1991 it was already a much different Soviet Union than we usually think and very late in its life as an effort to somehow keep it together, even though in a pretty different form. The wording makes it so that there was very little reason to oppose it unless you were a hardline independence advocate (so you might not respect their authority anyway or don’t want to give them credibility etc) since independence or no, it was promising more independence, human rights, freedom and so on. And in some countries that was tied to “let’s become independent at the same time but also keep in this new federation or what have you”. So it wasn’t even a “should we keep Soviet Union or not” but rather “should we make the union different, better”, which again, not much reason to oppose it no matter what you thought. Keeping it as it had been was the hardliner approach of keeping the older style Soviet Union and that wasn’t very popular.
And the new treaty was never signed because communist hardliners tried a coup to reverse the course. The attempt backfired horribly and just lead to even swifter dissolution. But I’d say it was already heading towards that anyway with people seeking to break away from Moscow and the whole system in a turmoil over reforms (to some too radical and to some not radical enough). In hindsight it feels like they would’ve needed a miracle to keep it together in any recognizable form.
Not to mention that the vote was boycotted by Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova.
They were sooooo keen to return to the Russian embrace (/s).
Progressive at first, but then sorta forgot about it.
At the start, women were given rights that suffragists in the UK or USA could only dream of. Then it stopped. By the 1960s, women in the USSR found that they were still expected to do all the same old household chores while also holding a job outside the home. Meanwhile, western feminism had developed a strong second wave, and later a third (arguably more since, but that gets complicated). Those waves dealt with increasingly abstract issues in the patriarchy, including the problem of household chores.
This simply didn’t happen in the USSR. Developing one would have required greater freedom of speech than anyone had in that country.
implying that corrupt scumbag Brezhnev was a proper communist
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Ah, right, the old “communism has never been tried”
Tried a bunch, but tried wrong.
The Lenin model of communism is inherently flawed for one simple reason. An Authoritarian Communism is an Impossibility. It cannot exist by pure definition.
The true ideal communism is a stateless utopia.
So yeah, the Lenin model is flawed to the point of uselessness. Or worse because any authoritarian government is going to kill its own citizens, while also being a low grade threat to neighboring countries.
No. The only path to true communism is via democracy. And there are countries that are moving in that direction.
The party was meant to just be the organizer of the workers, not the ruler. The degeneration took off only after Lenin’s death and the 4th Congress of the Comintern, which was dominated by Troika. that’s why Mayakovsky was a devout Bolshevik until Stalinzation advanced and started scrapping several progressive conquests of October, leading to his suicide at the refusal to prop up the Stalinist degeneracy.
Also Lenin was, for instance, not a big fan of the many experimental artistic movements that flourished after the Revolution, but did not suppress them, unlike Stalin.
He also regretted banning other parties (but which was necessitated by every single one of them taking up arms against Sovnarkom) and before his death wanted to offer Trotsky a post of Commisar of Internal Affairs in a desperate bid to curtail the bureaucracy, but Trotsky, unfortunately, refused.
Lenin betrayed the revolution. You mention the banning of the political parties. While it’s true that they “took up arms against Sovnarkom”, you’re leaving out the part where Lenin used Sovnarkom to coup the newly elected government because his party didn’t win.
Again, Lenin was flat out wrong. But I don’t think he ever actually cared about Russia ever reaching the true Marxist communist utopia. Lenin cared about power first and foremost.
He built up that dictatorship, and then handed it over to a monster.
the root of all modern languages
the whole universe used to speak it
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
P.S: the closest thing to that is Egyptian, but not the language, the Alphabet (the Symbols, not a literal alphabet). Tons of alphabets are descended from Egyptian, including, but not limited to: Greek (and by Proxy Latin, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Armenian and Armenian (I just noticed this, I’m leaving it in because it’s funny)), Arabic (and by proxy- I won’t list all that), Hebrew, and Aramaic (and by proxy all Indian languages but one, as well as Tibetan, Phags-pa mongol (and by proxy exactly 5 letters of Hangul), Thai, Lao, Sundanese, and Javanese). There’s a lot of dead languages that used scripts derived from Egyptian too but I didn’t mention them because I’d be here all day listing stuff like Sogdian or Norse Runes.
BASIC: Am I a joke to you?
Ahem… Assembly is tired of being forgotten
Assembly is like phonetic script.
section .data msg1 db "Those copper ingots were of terrible quality.",0 msg2 db "My servant was also treated very badly!",0
No, jokes are fun.
Phoenician wants a word.
Also descended from Egyptian. Forgot to add them though. They’re the link between Egyptian and Greek. and Egyptian and Aramaic
The whole (Mediterranean) universe.
I’m pretty sure these alphabets cover almost the entire globe
East Asia and it’s Chinese-derived alphabets being the big exception. The New World would be too, if it weren’t for barbarians in upturned helmets burning all the codices. I suppose Canada’s North is pretty dependent on indigenous syllabics, which were invented whole-cloth in the modern era.
I was referring to the Latin as per OP, though. And even then “used to” is doing a lot of the work, thanks to the Islamic empire conquering the Middle East and North Africa and converting it to Arabic. And maybe Greek prevailing in the East, but I’m guessing it would be hard to put an end date on Latin in the Byzantine empire.
Why is everyone down on Rust? Seriously. I don’t know it but I’ve considered learning it and it appeals to me and people literally scoff when I mention it. Saw it referred to as a meme language on Lemmy, which is built in Rust. What am I missing?
Butthurt C devs don’t want it replacing their language.
as guy who likes c: think rust is a good and cool idea
I think rust has good ideas and may even become the default systems language in the mid-term. I find it irritating that there is a very vocal subset of rust proponents that tend to insist that every project in every language needs to be rewritten in rust immediately. I suspect that is also why other people are down on rust.
That makes sense! Thanks for your insight
I think ppl just got pissed with the fanboys unironically asking to RIIR everything. The language itself is comfy AF, tho
For me “The Critical Flaw” of rust is its compiler. And requirent of 12 GB of disk space to compile just the frontend of compiler. Even GCC will all frontends(C, C++, Ada, Fortran, Modula-2, JIT) requires less space.
But joke is probably about “rewrite in rust” culture.
Wow that’s enormous. I’ll have to learn more about that. Thanks for the info!
Maybe someone ought to rewrite rust in C.
that’s because Rust is more modern and in modern days we don’t rly have hard disk limitation, also it’s probably because the compiler tells you the solution to most problems
and in modern days we don’t rly have hard disk limitation
well if you are a corporation, that’s true. Otherwise, not much
I mean c’mon, every pc that can compile rust in a reasonable time has at least 20gb of storage
yeah but I don’t want to use up 20 GB just for a single project. It’s not like my hard drive is 80% free. more like 10% free, even though it’s large, because I’m using it and I’m already selective on what I’m doing on it
Imo it’s bc it’s the new kid on the block. Yes it’s 10 years old but barely becoming common use in production and government mandates are only speeding that up. In actuality it’s a great language and has been hyped for a few years by people who actually use it. Python went through the same thing in the 2010s where devs really tried clowning on it, now it’s used everywhere.
Good to know, I’ve only been a dev since 2019 so I appreciate the long view
I don’t think many ppl are down on rust… it’s won developer’s most favorite to use for like 5+ years now in a row on stackoverflow.
i think it’s mainly people being cranky and set in their ways. they got used to working around all the footguns/bad design decisions of the C/C++ specifications and really don’t want to feel like it was all for nothing. they’re comfortable with C/C++, and rust is new and uncomfortable. i think for some people, being a C/C++ developer is also a big part of their identity, and it might be uncomfortable to let that go.
i also think there’s a historical precedent for this kind of thing: when a new way of doing things emerges, many of the people who grew up doing it the old way get upset about it and refuse to accept that the new way might be an improvement.
Some rust proponents having this attitude is probably part of the problem.
Is Rust as close to the metal as C? Seems like there would still be a need for C. I could see Rust replacing Java as something that’s so ceremonial and verbose, but from my limited perspective as a sometimes java dev, having only the most glancing experience with C, it seems like C would be hard to replace because of what it is. Buy I honestly don’t know much about Rust either, I just think JS is so finicky and unpredictable whereas web assembly seems extremely fast and stable.
Rust can create native binaries but I wouldn’t call it close to the metal like C. It’s certainly possible to bootstrap from assembly to Rust but, unlike C, every operation doesn’t have a direct analog to an assembly operation. For example Rust needs to be able to dynamically allocate memory for all of its syntax to be intact.
For example Rust needs to be able to dynamically allocate memory for all of its syntax to be intact.
Hmm, you got an example of what you mean?
Rust can be used without allocations, as is for example commonly done with embedded.
That does mean, you can’t use dynamically sized types, likeString,VecandPathBuf, but I wouldn’t consider those part of the syntax, they’re rather in the std lib…So you’re right that this is a bit arbitrary because the line between the standard lib and the language is blurry, but someone writing Rust is going to expect Vec to work, it doesn’t even require an extra “use” to get it.
Perhaps a better core example would be operator overloading (or really any place using traits). When looking at “a + b” in Rust you have to be aware that, depending on the types involved, that could mean anything.
Anyway, I love Rust, it just doesn’t have the 1:1 relationship with the assembly output that C basically still has.
Thank you for the explanation.
I mean, the simple proof is that Rust has been growing by leaps and bounds in the embedded world, which is the closest to bare metal you get. It’s also being used in the Linux kernel and Windows, and there are several projects building new kernels in pure Rust. So yeah, it’s safe to say that it’s as close to the metal as C.
Also, the comparison to Java is understandable if you’ve only been exposed to Rust by the memes, but it doesn’t hold up in practice. Rust has a lot more syntax than C (although that’s not saying much), but it’s one of the most expressive languages on the market today.
It’s slightly less close to the metal as C. Array bounds checks are always going to cost you something, for example. However, if you look at the speed of numeric computation in C, Rust, and Go, they’re all in the same order of magnitude performance compared to things like Python or JavaScript (not including things like PyPi, which is C with extra steps).
Wow thanks so much for breaking that down for me! The discussions I’ve been having here and the information devs are sharing is really kicking me off the fence about learning Rust
Eh, I’d still go for it. I find the Rust compiler tends to amplify my impostor syndrome–it tells you all the ways you are objectively being stupid. I know that’s not really selling it, but it’s doing that stuff for a reason. I’m especially hopeful that it becomes the standard way to do things with microcontrollers; that’s about the only place I write C/C++ at all.
Noted!
It’s like a good C++ that is actually able to replace it. There are lots of places where a good C++ is useful. Like everything that needs low latency and low resource usage.
But it’s not an easy language, so (I’m guessing) people who see everyone loving it but are unable to learn it start to suffer some sort of cognitive dissonance. If it’s too difficult for me to learn, that must be its fault, not mine.
Cause it’s a C++ replacement when said audience never asked for one. It’s great but it’s still waaaayy too early, people need to slowly get comfortable with it.
I finally found the real reason why I like java: I‘m german
I don’t get why I don’t like Rust then
You will, comrade.
Do you like Russian, tho? Some Russians I’ve encountered did find it overcomplicated at times… Но в целом понимаю: мне норм заходит энглиш, а жабаскрипт вообще мимо
Yeah, I think it’s a beautiful and expressive language. I also do like Java, though.
вообще мимо
Please help, я это не понимаю.
Basically translates to “despite me liking English, js is not my cup of tea”. “Вообще мимо” can also be more literally translated as “a complete miss”, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s used that way
Ah! That makes sense. I wasn’t expecting мимо to act like a noun in this way. Большое спасибо.
I also love Java, especially all the goodies added in 17. I’m not German though… 🤔
Maybe you‘d have fun learning german then ;)
You are now. Herzlichen Glückwunsch.
Have you ever tried kotlin?
Swabian here. I like C#. Guess that fits.
That’s the reason I’m deeply offended. I’m german too. 😉
I’m also German, and our beautiful language being compared to java feels like an insult to me.
Strength in diversity, I guess
PHP is Russian. Used to be huge, caused lots of problems, now slowly dwindling away. Its supporters keep saying how it’s still better than the competition.
In Soviet Russia memory manages you!
It’s a cool meme but I have many many disagreements.
I can confidently tell you that no one who actually knows Latin would ever say French is “Latin with fancy rules.”
…which ironically makes for a perfect parallel with “C/C++”
C++ is pig latin
I just have some high school Latin from long ago, but if you parse “fancy” as “ornamental at the expense of utility”, then I think it’s a fair description.
That’s a good point. I parsed “fancy” as “more intricate” and was immediately affronted ;) I like your take on it.
Btw, your username just gave me a good belly laugh
It fits, English and JavaScript are both three languages in a trench coat.
As a python developer, I’ll accept the shower joke in stride. But who are these Esperanto speakers you’re shitting on?
It’s just Shatner, isn’t it? Except even he doesn’t really speak it even though he was in a movie that was entirely Esperanto.
I guess assembler is sumerien then, only still written and understood? And cobol or fortran? Linear a and b?
FORTRAN: Proto-Indo-European COBOL: Proto-Sino-Tibetic
Assembly: neuron signals
Assembly is ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs.
Well latin isn’t the root of all modern languages
Yes, but “Proto Indo-European” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. /s
It isn’t even the root of the indo-european languages and the Indo-European languages are just one of many language families around the world.
Source I am from Austria. :)
Exactly. Nobody knows how the tongue was involved in h2.
Dravidian?
But people like and appreciate German.
Yeah, I enjoyed learning German… Java on the other hand…
