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The weirdest languages

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Re: The weirdest languages

#11

Post by Svip »

A1kmm wrote: post #6

There 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…

The main problem with this analysis - I think - is that each language rank as 1, regardless of actual speaker size and history. There is a reason why some languages are much larger than others (mostly historical and political), and these larger languages (like English) has thus evolved towards a more simplified version of its former self.

English is thus - for all intends and purposes - not weird.

A more interesting approach would be to take larger languages, like English, Mandarin, Spanish, etc. and value their features higher than languages spoken by tribes or very few people, and thus you could determine a more accurate 'weirdness' index out of that.

Re: The weirdest languages

#12

Post by Osmium »

A1kmm wrote: post #6

There 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…

I would call these more "caveats" than "problems" -- anything with a title like "weirdest languages" is going to be incredibly subjective, and there will be no doubt no shortage of people who disagree with specific choices, but as long as the reasoning is clear it can still be interesting/useful.

> This could explain the result for Hindi - it is a standard language that 'averages' a large number of other Indian languages.

I think this is a little misleading; a lot of Indian languages come from a completely different language family to Hindi (Hindi is Indo-European, but a lot of Indian languages are Dravidian, e.g. Tamil and Urdu), though I'm not qualified to speak about this.

Re: The weirdest languages

#13

Post by mxfh »

WildUtah wrote: post #4

Seems 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'…

As I understand it dialects which somehow qualify as language are weighted more than English and all it's dialects? Definitions of languages tend to be quite arbitrary or even politically motivated at times; look no further than the Balkans or Moldovan [1].

"a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Controversy [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...

Re: The weirdest languages

#15

Post by [deleted] »

chewxy wrote: post #9
WildUtah wrote: post #4

Seems 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…

[deleted]

Re: The weirdest languages

#17

Post by nemo1618 »

It'd be cool if they could include artificial languages like Esperanto and lojban. Given that one goal of both languages is to appeal to speakers of any language, it would be interesting to see if they achieved their goal (i.e. produced a very "non-weird" language).

Re: The weirdest languages

#18

Post by bad_user »

mxfh wrote: post #13
WildUtah wrote: post #4

Seems 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'…

As I understand it dialects which somehow qualify as language are weighted more than English and all it's dialects? Definitions of languages tend to be quite arbitrary or even politically motivated at times; look no further than the Balkans or Moldovan [1]. "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Controversy [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_…

What do you mean by Moldovan?

Re: The weirdest languages

#19

Post by Dewie »

It's interesting to me how Norwegian is one of the top 25 strangest languages in the world on that list, but Danish and Swedish isn't. Maybe it was on the lower end of the top 25.

Re: The weirdest languages

#20

Post by dagw »

Dewie wrote: post #19

It's interesting to me how Norwegian is one of the top 25 strangest languages in the world on that list, but Danish and Swedish isn't. Maybe it was on the lower end of the top 25.

One possible theory is that it could be related how the data set deals with (or fails to deal with) Book-Norwegian vs New-Norwegian. Also modern Swedish and Danish grammar only uses two genders while Norwegian still has three, so that could weight in.
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