balessi Newbie Brazil Joined 4900 days ago 8 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, German
| Message 1 of 14 19 December 2010 at 4:56am | IP Logged |
Could you imagine a fictional language which texts looks like this:
Î Ìåööîôàíòè åùå ïðè åãî æèçíè õîäèëè ëåãåíäû. Êðîìå îñíîâíûõ åâðîïåéñêèõ ÿçûêîâ,...
full of diacritics and almost devoid of consonants?
That is is how my browser shows the contents of this page: http://how-to-learn-any-
language.com/e/books/poliglotov.html
Now, putting fiction aside, what language or languages do you think is weirdest?
Edited by balessi on 19 December 2010 at 4:56am
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Patchy Newbie Joined 4939 days ago 25 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 2 of 14 19 December 2010 at 5:28am | IP Logged |
Tenerife, Spain, Africa.
Well, I reckon one of the most unique ways of communicating is Canarian whistling.
Unfortunately, part of what makes it weird is that any information available about it
is usually misleading and downright wrong.
But strictly speaking it's not a language, but rather a unique and useful way of
transmitting a language, in this case Spanish.
So I suppose it doesn't count, huh?
In that case, the weirdest I've heard of has to be one from your country, called
Piraha, if what I am led to believe
is true (no numbers, no singular/plural contrast, no words for colours, no personal
pronouns, no extended kinship terms, no tenses as such, less phonemes than any other
spoken language, and; like Spanish; it can also be transmitted whistled and even
hummed).
Best wishes,
Patchy.
Edited by Patchy on 19 December 2010 at 5:39am
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Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian
| Message 4 of 14 19 December 2010 at 2:49pm | IP Logged |
Lojban is also pretty darn weird.
http://www.lojban.org
Edited by Levi on 19 December 2010 at 2:53pm
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koba Heptaglot Senior Member AustriaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5679 days ago 118 posts - 201 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, French
| Message 5 of 14 20 December 2010 at 11:27pm | IP Logged |
I find personally Basque very weird.
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Pleiades Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4907 days ago 10 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English*, Welsh
| Message 6 of 14 21 December 2010 at 4:39pm | IP Logged |
The Indian languages of North America are wonderfully complex. The morpheme-word ratio is staggering and one 'word' is normally more akin to a sentence by Indo-European standards. I can't comprehend how one could possibly speak an agglutinative language with fluency considering the thought process required to construct even the simplest of sentences.
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GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5334 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French
| Message 7 of 14 21 December 2010 at 5:31pm | IP Logged |
Very complex agglutinative languages make me wonder if somebody could take mathematics rules, implement them in a language somehow, and eventually do large calculations easily.
Edited by GREGORG4000 on 21 December 2010 at 5:32pm
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