<story><title>Finnish as a world language?</title><url>https://www.hagen-schmidt.de/suomi/worldlanguage.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrac</author><text>It should be Japanese, of course!&lt;p&gt;Japanese can be written using either the Latin alphabet, or Chinese characters.  The two most common writing systems in the world.  It can also be written with its own elegant and purely phonetic writing system.  There&amp;#x27;s even Braille, Morse code, and sign language encodings.  It is truly media agnostic.&lt;p&gt;Japanese has a regular grammar.  From a linguist&amp;#x27;s perspective, aside from the politeness system, it&amp;#x27;s really quite &lt;i&gt;normal&lt;/i&gt; for a language.  Very little in it to surprise a Finnish, Turkish or Korean speaker.   (Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.)&lt;p&gt;Finally, some 40% of Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese, and Chinese and Japanese technical terms flow freely between the languages to this day.  Another ~20% of Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from European languages like English or Portuguese.  The majority of the world already speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don&amp;#x27;t even know it!  For this reason, Chinese, European, and American, alike, usually find it quite easy to learn.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>United857</author><text>&amp;gt; speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don&amp;#x27;t even know it&lt;p&gt;Only for a very loose definition of &amp;quot;speaking&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;A Chinese without knowledge of Japanese reading it or vice versa would be like a English speaker reading French or vice versa.  You&amp;#x27;d recognize some vocabulary, but the grammar and pronounciation is significantly different and most of the overall sentence is still foreign.&lt;p&gt;Even English loanwords are significantly altered by shortening and mapping to Japanese tones.  Most English speakers wouldn&amp;#x27;t recognize &amp;quot;terebi&amp;quot; (television) or &amp;quot;konbini&amp;quot; (convenience store) for example.</text></comment>
<story><title>Finnish as a world language?</title><url>https://www.hagen-schmidt.de/suomi/worldlanguage.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrac</author><text>It should be Japanese, of course!&lt;p&gt;Japanese can be written using either the Latin alphabet, or Chinese characters.  The two most common writing systems in the world.  It can also be written with its own elegant and purely phonetic writing system.  There&amp;#x27;s even Braille, Morse code, and sign language encodings.  It is truly media agnostic.&lt;p&gt;Japanese has a regular grammar.  From a linguist&amp;#x27;s perspective, aside from the politeness system, it&amp;#x27;s really quite &lt;i&gt;normal&lt;/i&gt; for a language.  Very little in it to surprise a Finnish, Turkish or Korean speaker.   (Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.)&lt;p&gt;Finally, some 40% of Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese, and Chinese and Japanese technical terms flow freely between the languages to this day.  Another ~20% of Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from European languages like English or Portuguese.  The majority of the world already speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don&amp;#x27;t even know it!  For this reason, Chinese, European, and American, alike, usually find it quite easy to learn.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kriro</author><text>I think Koran is quite interesting. The symbols were designed from scratch iirc. and they are extremly logical. I&amp;#x27;d argue that most people will be able to read and correctly pronounce Korean in a couple of days (even if they don&amp;#x27;t understand a single word the are saying) which is quite astonishing. I was pleasently surprised at the logical structure. When I first saw the symbols my western brain said &amp;quot;oh my, this is complex and hard&amp;quot;. I was shocked how wrong I was.</text></comment>