I have been studying languages for quite some time. I say languages because I am interested in all of them, although I cannot quite speak any as fluently as I would like.

Nevertheless, browsing through pages, reading books, living amidst people of different cultures and trying to acknowledge the most I could about other languages, I realized that all of them have properties that can indeed be quite frustrating for the learner. Why so?, you ask. Why does the language that I want to learn have to be so difficult? Why does it have such weird constructions?, or Why does it take this preposition, rather than that one? Well, I cannot answer that, but what you can expect to find here is pretty much that which can make you feel like giving up on it, after so many failed attempts into speaking it.

Do not give in, though. I have only tried to look upon the aforementioned remarkable characteristics with a rather jestful point of view, in an effort to, as much as I could, provide a positive outlook on life - since it has dragged us down the drain so many times. Let us just try and look through the spyglass the other way around. Perhaps we will see that life can be funnier than we thought.

I shall therefore start this blog by shortly mentioning Tariana.

Tariana is an endangered Arawak language from a remote region in the northwest Amazonian jungle. Its speakers traditionally marry someone speaking a different language, and as a result most people are fluent in five or six languages. Because of this rampant multilingualism, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from the protolanguage with properties diffused from neighbouring but unrelated Tucanoan languages. Typologically unusual features of the language include: an array of classifiers independent of genders, complex serial verbs, case marking depending on the topicality of a noun, and double marking of case and of number. Tariana has obligatory evidentiality: every sentence contains a special element indicating whether the information was seen, heard, or inferred by the speaker, or whether the speaker acquired it from somebody else. In other words:

In English I can tell my son: "Today I talked to Adrian," and he won't ask: "How do you know you talked to Adrian?" But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something - we call it "evidentiality." I would have to say: "I talked to Adrian, non-visual," if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: "She talked to Adrian, non-visual, reported." In that language, if you don't say how you know things, they think you are a liar.

So, if the lingua franca of the world were Tariana, what exactly would this mean for George W. Bush and Tony Blair if they had given speeches about attacking Iraq because they had heard that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? I wonder if there are enough suffixes in Tariana to convey believability in this particular case.

Oh, and by the way... there is even a Tariana Grammarbook.

Taken from:
1. How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons
2. Language Log
3. Cambridge: A Grammar of Tariana
4. The Linguist List