Language
The Lao language is a tonal, analytic, right-branching, pronoun pro-drop language of the Tai–Kadai language family, closely related to Thai and other languages of Tai peoples. Most of the vocabulary is of native Tai origin, although important contributions have come from Pali and Sanskrit as well as Mon–Khmer languages. The alphabet is an indic-based alphabet. Although the Lao have five major dialects, they are all mutually intelligible and Lao people believe they all speak variations of one language.
Read more about this topic: Lao People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“I now thinke, Love is rather deafe, than blind,
For else it could not be,
That she,
Whom I adore so much, should so slight me,
And cast my love behind:
I’m sure my language to her, was as sweet,
And every close did meet
In sentence, of as subtile feet,
As hath the youngest Hee,”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)