Follow LangFocus on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the LangFocus channel and my name is Paul.
Today's video is the third installment in the Mystery Languages series.
Maybe you've seen Mystery Languages one and two. If not, you can find it right here.
But here is how it works:
I'll play you a sample of the language, and then, I'll show you a written sample of the language
and you can make a educated guess as to what that language is.
And don't worry if you can't guess the exact language correctly.
The important thing is that you tell us your guesses and your reasons for your guesses in the comments down below.
And that will start a lot of interesting discussions.
So let's get right into the first language.
Please listen.
Now let's see some written samples of that language.
This means : "How much is this?"
This means : "Where is the toilet?"
This means : "Speak more slowly, please"
This means : "Could you write it please?"
So, what language is it?
The language is Catalan.
A Romance language spoken mostly in eastern Spain as well as in Andorra.
And in part of France
If you guessed Spanish or Portuguese or another Romance language, then you're not too far off.
In fact, Catalan has 85% lexical similarity with Spanish
But the two are only partly mutually intelligible.
Catalan is part of the Occitano-Romance subfamily, along with Occitan.
It's always interesting to take a look at a Romance language that you're not too familiar with,
because you might see some features of one Romance language
and some different features from another Romance language.
If we look at this sentence again, "podria" looks like the spanish word for "could"
This word "escriure" seems kind of like "écrire" in French or "scrivere" in Italian which means "to write".
And this phrase "si us plau" seems like "s'il vous plaît" in French
So you can see why some people say that learning two Romance languages helps you understand the fair bit of the others. At least in writing.
Okay, on to the next language.
Please listen
And again let's have a look at some written samples.
This means "how are you?" when said to a male.
This means "Pleased to meet you".
This means "what is your name?" when said to a male.
This means "where are you from?"
So what language is it?
The language's Amharic.
Amharic is a language spoken in Ethiopia by around 22 million people.
It's a member of the Semitic language family meaning that it's related to Arabic and Hebrew.
But it's not intelligible with those languages.
I've studied Hebrew and Arabic in the past but I can't understand Amharic at all.
But there are a couple of cognates I can see in these written samples.
Like the word for "name" : "sem".
In Arabic the word is "ism".
And in Hebrew, it's "shem".
Here in Amharic "semeh" is your name
with the suffix "eh" being a possessive pronoun.
In Arabic, you'd say "ismak" and in Hebrew, you'd say "shimcha"
Also "man" is the word for "what",
which might be related to the Arabic word "maa" and the Hebrew word "ma".
Okay. On to the next language.
Please listen.
And again let's see some written samples of this language.
This means "Please to meet you".
This means "Where are you from?"
This means "Long time no see".
This means "Have a good journey"
So what language is it?
It's the Tamil language.
Tamil is a language spoken in southern India as well as in Sri Lanka,
as well as by Tamil communities overseas in places like Malaysia and Singapore.
Tamil is a Dravidian language which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages spoken in northern India.
Tamil has a long literary history reaching back to around 2,600 years ago.
The Tamil script is an abugida meaning a script in which consonants and vowels are written together as units which can't be separated.
Come to think of it, the Amharic script that we had a glance at earlier is also an abugida.
Well, I hope you had fun guessing today's mystery languages.
Be sure to leave your guesses and your reasons for your guesses in the comments down below.
And I'm sure that will start lots of interesting discussions.
Be sure to follow Langfocus on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
And I'd like to say thank you to all of my patreon supporters,
especially these ones right here on the screen for their continuous monthly pledges.
Thank you very much and have a nice day.