Your Native Tongue

[mark]

@prathapml Very interesting poll.

A German once asked me "What do you call someone who speaks two languages?" answere: bilingual. "what do you call someone who speaks three or more languages?" answere: polyglot. "What do you call someone who speaks one language?" answere: American. Of course, he was asking me these questions in English.

[ChunkDog]

I heard that English is the best language to use when trying to explain technical stuff, like problems with a computer. If you speek English, you have probubly noticed that a person speaking a different language will sound something like this:

Blah blaaah bla blah K-Mart. Blahhhh bla bla blaaahhh Ralphs.

just to give an example, and not trying to flame, but the English language seems to me to be the most flexible, and you can make s*** up, like "Flamerific" or "Flamtastic", English is the s***

[Karel]

Mother tongue is Dutch. Fluent in French, English and German (in that order)

[Doggie]

i dont think i even voted.. hmm anyways english is my native, but i can speak a lil spanish and german

[mark]

@ChunkDog I tend to agree with you but at the same time Chinese is supposed to be the most complex and English the hardest to learn because it has incorporated so much from other languages and the rules and structure are all over the place. Also what you point out with it being so flexible that you can make up words ( and misspell them: light=lite), change words to suit your needs (nouns to verbs: Bobbit to bobbitize) or take words from another language and use them (take a pick). With those circumstances, the English language also ends up having the largest vocabulary (600,000 words ?) and German is second with 200,000. Having a large vocabulary allows you to say something with fewer words, which I have seen between translating from English to Spanish.

Having said that and not really being sure on the accuracy of my statements, you have to admire those that have English as a second or third language. No matter how well or poorly they speak English. And it looks really bad when a native English speaker is outspelled by a 'foreigner', which I see a lot of. And how many of you 'foreigners' write code also? Code to me is another language, Greek to be exact.

Earlier, I indicated that I only speak English. Well I also speak the itsy-bitsiest amount of Spanish.

[phyxsius]

Binary;

01001101 01111001

01101110 01100001 01110100 01101001 01110110 01100101

01110100 01101111 01101110 01100111 01110101 01100101

01101001 01110011

01000100 01110101 01110100 01100011 01101000

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hex and Octal are no problem too.

I also speak English, french, german, a little bit of spanish and i know a few words in latin.

And of course programming languages, html, java, xml, flash actionscript, php etc.

I am what u call "multi-Lingual"

[Cee-Kay]

English is my native tongue, but I can also speak French, Italian and also some Spanish.

[mark]

Binary;

01001101 01111001

01101110 01100001 01110100 01101001 01110110 01100101

01110100 01101111 01101110 01100111 01110101 01100101

01101001 01110011

01000100 01110101 01110100 01100011 01101000

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hex and Octal are no problem too.

I also speak English, french, german, a little bit of spanish and i know a few words in latin.

And of course programming languages, html, java, xml, flash actionscript, php etc.

I am what u call "multi-Lingual" 

Polyglot (English will give you a multitude of choices sometimes, which we have from making select choices out of other languages. So, if you know English really, really, really well, does it count as two languages? @XPero for understanding OE, hats off). Which almost all of you are.

XPero made a comment about this 'mix'. I have to agree, wholeheartedly.

[eagle00789]

Dutch native, but also fluent english, html, php, delphi

[Famer]

english but want to learn japanese

[phoenix_nf]

Hey mine is supp to be Marathi, but i can only understand it cant speak, cuz dads mum n all spoke east indian marathi, mom mum n all spoke konkani, in school we had hindi and the normal marathi. and in all of this i got totally confused and can understand all these languages, but can read, write and speak only English.

So its English

[SC00BS]

My native tongue is Klingon

[Astalavista]

english, chinese, tagalog, a little japanese, a little spanish,

[KernelOverlord]

English mainly plus Portuguese. Throw in some perl, Python, java, add a pinch of hex and binary and now lets talk about Kernels and source code - weve got a conversation going - lol!

[phoenix_nf]

Hey i thought it was only normal languages, that way add me in to abC, abC++, Java, Perl, PHP, etc of scripting languages,... w8 i know more , just cant get the names in my head. after all "whats in a name".