The weirdest languages
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The weirdest languages
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: The weirdest languages
#2This is great. I'm really happy to learn about WALS. I've been interested in constructing a practical standard language for humans for a long time. This kind of survey of what works seems essential.
Re: The weirdest languages
#3I think we should have expected that Mandarin is weird but Cantonese is very normal - in the same way that Japan has a weird primary writing system, but its secondary writing system (Hiragana) is one of the most regular in the world. In fact the same reasoning could apply to Hindi - it's (or was until recently) a secondary language in India, with English as the language of government. Do other countries with two languages follow the same pattern? E.g. I would predict from this that Afrikaans would be a very non-weird language.
Re: The weirdest languages
#4Seems like OP should have considered a popularity weighting. Among the 25 weirdest we see Mandarin and Spanish, the world's two most popular languages by native speaker count. That's a hint that what you're measuring isn't exactly weirdness.
Meanwhile I see Hungarian, famous for being the hardest language to learn, is fifth least weird. Even stranger, Cantonese, which is almost exactly the same in writing as 'weird' Mandarin, is sixth least weird. How can two languages that you write the same be so very far apart in feature set?
Re: The weirdest languages
#5It would be cool if the author made the dataset available it would be fun to try other things with it - population weighing (as WildUtah mentions), grouping them by language families and calculating intra and inter-group weirdness (and distances), clustering the languages into new groups, calculating weirdness as mean distance in the 21 dimensional space to all other languages, projecting the space itself on a plane so that we can see it better,...
Re: The weirdest languages
#6There are a few potential problems which limit the significance of this:
1. There is not a universal definition of what defines a language and what is simply a dialect or a regional variation; this applies especially on large continents where there can be greater variation in language features between geographically remote locations, but no clean boundary at which you can say people speak one or the other language.
2. Languages evolve, diverge and sometimes borrow, and so a group of related languages can share the same potentially idiosyncratic feature because of common evolutionary roots rather than because the feature makes sense. This could explain the result for Hindi - it is a standard language that 'averages' a large number of other Indian languages.
Re: The weirdest languages
#7Seems like OP should have considered a popularity weighting. Among the 25 weirdest we see Mandarin and Spanish, the world's two most popular languages by native speaker count. That's a hint that what you're measuring isn't exactly weirdness. Meanwhile I see Hungarian, famous for being the hardest language to learn, is fifth least weird. Even stranger, Cantonese, which is almost exactly the same in writing as 'weird'…
Seems like they are just counting the weird features of languages. It is correct that language like Turkish (probably Hungarian as well) is least weird because it does not have any of the weird features like word gender, irregular verbs, prefixes etc. But two main features of language, extreme inflection and vowel harmony makes learning it difficult.
Re: The weirdest languages
#8It would be cool if the author made the dataset available it would be fun to try other things with it - population weighing (as WildUtah mentions), grouping them by language families and calculating intra and inter-group weirdness (and distances), clustering the languages into new groups, calculating weirdness as mean distance in the 21 dimensional space to all other languages, projecting the space itself on a plane…
You can download it yourself at http://wals.info/export . And given enough effort, you can quite quickly reverse engineer which 21 features were used.
Re: The weirdest languages
#9Seems like OP should have considered a popularity weighting. Among the 25 weirdest we see Mandarin and Spanish, the world's two most popular languages by native speaker count. That's a hint that what you're measuring isn't exactly weirdness. Meanwhile I see Hungarian, famous for being the hardest language to learn, is fifth least weird. Even stranger, Cantonese, which is almost exactly the same in writing as 'weird'…
I think 'weirdness' in this context should not be conflated with 'norm'. Instead, as I read it, I think about it the same way you would think about the regularity of a language (to put it into compsci terms)
I speak both mandarin and cantonese. I think a lot of the 'weirdness' factor comes from actually saying the words. Also there are some words in cantonese that are not in mandarin. For example, in Cantonese, there is 'mou' (the negation of having), while in Mandarin, it'd be pronounced as two words ('mei2 you3). Spoken cantonese in some regards, is easier to pick up than spoken mandarin (definitely easier to cuss in)
Re: The weirdest languages
#10It would be cool if the author made the dataset available it would be fun to try other things with it - population weighing (as WildUtah mentions), grouping them by language families and calculating intra and inter-group weirdness (and distances), clustering the languages into new groups, calculating weirdness as mean distance in the 21 dimensional space to all other languages, projecting the space itself on a plane…
You can download it yourself at http://wals.info/export . And given enough effort, you can quite quickly reverse engineer which 21 features were used.
That's the thing, he reduced the dataset from 2677 languages with 192 features to 239 languages with 21 features. That's usually the hardest part of any analysis, so it would be nice if he shared the results of his hard work with us...