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The weirdest languages | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| rodrigoau Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 3633 days ago 19 posts - 52 votes  Speaks: Macedonian*, English, Spanish Studies: Italian, Turkish | Message 1 of 8 02 May 2015 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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Who would have thought? Spanish is weird (relatively speaking), but Hungarian isn't.
Check this link if you haven't before. http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/ 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Labebrett Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 4172 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 2 of 8 07 May 2015 at 4:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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This is pretty interesting. I wouldn't have expected certain related languages to be so disparate.
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| taqseem Newbie Switzerland Joined 5693 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Studies: English | Message 3 of 8 09 May 2015 at 11:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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i always knew there was something wrong with German.
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| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4252 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 8 09 May 2015 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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As a Finnish speaker IE languages are all super weird to me. Possessive adjectives, noun gender, the verb "to have", reflexive pronoun... I was amused that Swedish and Norwegian were a lot higher than Icelandic on the weirdness scale though.
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| richarddylan126 Newbie United States Joined 3353 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes | Message 5 of 8 17 October 2015 at 8:32am | IP Logged | |||||
I think Spanish is not in the list of weird languages. I was reading something about languages somehow through google i found a list. Here is the list of weird languages 10. Archi 9. Yupik 8. Sentinelese 7. Pawnee 6. Silbo Gomero 5. Xhosa 4. Pirahã 3. Rotokas 2. Khoisan 1. !Xóõ (Taa) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5134 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 6 of 8 17 October 2015 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Never heard any of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4771 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 7 of 8 18 October 2015 at 8:36am | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by vonPeterhof on 18 October 2015 at 8:37am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 8 23 October 2015 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have now read the article about weirdness, and the first observation is that it is based on The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), and I would normally consider that as a fairly trustworthy source. The question is what the researchers have done to define weirdness, and here it seems that they first filter out some languages with insufficient data, and then they let each remaining language have one 'vote'. And then they base their calculations on the percentage of language that share a certain feature (as defined in WALS). The lower the percentage, the higher contribuition of that feature to the weirdness index.
This definition is actually quite logical, but maybe it would have been better to speak about 'atypical' or 'unusual' languages - not because of any negative connotations that may cling to the word "weird", but because this isn't an investigation based on qualitative evaluations apart from in the choice of checked features: once the features and the languages have been defined it ONLY deals with frequencies. For instance the article mentions that inversion in yes-no questions is very rare: only 1,4% of the languages under consideration have this feature, and they are clustered in Europe. Attached question particles are much more common, and therefore it is quite logical that inversion in questions adds to the weirdness index. And in spite of being a weirdo English has become a world language spoken by hundreds of millions of people, so the question is what practical consequences being weird have for the users and learners of a language. The silly orthography and chaotic rules for the use of prepositions pose more problems for learners of English than things like "do" and the odd inversion here and there do. Edited by Iversen on 23 October 2015 at 1:23pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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