Elegant Languages

  • Which are the most elegant known languages? By elegant I mean: * not based on ideograms * self-consistent * minimum number of verb conjugation patterns and exceptions * minimum number of non-phonetic spellings * minimum number of borrowed foreign words * minimum number of words with multiple meanings * minimum number of words with same meaning * minimum dependency on diacritical marks * no silly concept of nouns having gender


  • All right GW, Perhaps this will work for you. Hungarian. The nouns are neutral. It's not similar to most languages. As a Finno-Ugric language, it's related to Finnish and Estonian. While it does have some words from the latin, and is rapidly picking up English, the language is still pretty much intact. The spelling is phonetic, so it's essentially easy to learn. It uses the same alphebet as English, so it's easy to read. There are two primary accents or diacritial marks. And speaking of elegance, the greeting for 'hello' translates to "I kiss your hand." "Your welcome" is "with my heart." Very gracious and romantic. Best wishes TaxMama-ga


  • Hello, I would appreciate it if you could provide a few additional candidate languages, instead of just one.


  • Dear GW, Frankly, based on your specifications, I don't know of any other languages that qualify. You've eliminated all the oriental languages, by excluding ideograms. You've eliminated Middle Eastern and Romance languages, Russian, Greek, Slavic, German and most of Europe by the concept of gender. So that effectively eliminates several continents - South America, North America, Asia, and Europe, North Africa. What's left? Let's see - The Artic and Antartica, Africa and the various Islands. Hawaiian might meet your standards. It has fewer letters than most languages. All of the words are phonetic. No diacritical marks. But, these days, it has borrowed a great deal from the Japanese and American languages. If you want to really go into depth on this you may want to pursue this and do some research yourself. Here is a fabulous site to work from - Ethnologue Take a look at their Ethnologue country index http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp Look at the detail they have about the multitude of African Languages alone! http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Africa There might be some languages that meet your criteria in the Pacific http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=The+Pacific There are hundreds of languages spoken by small populations in the world. To research them all would take years.


    • November 18th 2008 Posted to munchsmadonna.com edit