Yeah...This is fun >.>

[Sayuri-Ryuu]

Ah. I see.  

[kittyfox_kumiko]

It was worse when I made up my own spellings. "Alterran" instead of "Alteran". I can explain it, though. "Altus" is Latin for "high" and "Terra" is Earth, so "above earth". Then it hits me "wait, it comes from 'alter' the word for 'other'."  

[Sayuri-Ryuu]

Did you study lingustics as well as Archaeology?  

[kittyfox_kumiko]

No, I study Latin. mrgreen

I tried to sign up for a linguistics class, but it filled up. sad  

[Sayuri-Ryuu]

Ah. I knew that, but thought maybe you did other languages too. You seem interested in it. I wanted to do linguistics for a while there, but all the courses here are crap.  

[kittyfox_kumiko]

I want to do it, too! I love languages, especially playing with them.  

[Sayuri-Ryuu]

Me too! And figuring out where words come from, and they're made up, and all.  

[Kaiser_MageMule]

im learning french and spanish right now.  

[kittyfox_kumiko]

I tried them. Of the two, I like Spanish most.

I love etymology. mrgreen  

[Sayuri-Ryuu]

Me too. One of the reasons I love Japanese. Its structured nothing like anything roman-or-earlier based.  

[kittyfox_kumiko]

Is it anything like neighboring languages, though?  

[Sayuri-Ryuu]

The only other Asian language I know anything about is Chinese, and it is quite different from Japanese in that its phonetic. Its your tone that decides the meaning of the word, not the word itself. They share written languages, though.  

[kittyfox_kumiko]

Meaning?  

[Sayuri-Ryuu]

Chinese is written in pictogram-characters called Kanji. Japanese uses Kanji too, although, just to make it more confusing, they give it a new sound. So, for instance, the Kanji used to denote, say, "like/love" in Japanese is said "su" but it will have a different sound in Chinese. Japanese also has two other alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana, which are native to Japan and nothing to do with Chinese.  

[kittyfox_kumiko]

Alphabets aside, though, do they sound similar?