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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
by A1kmm 13y ago
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. 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.
- Svip 13y agoThe 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.
- jsmeaton 13y agoJust because something is popular it doesn't mean parts of it aren't "weird". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sentences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sent...
- Osmium 13y agoI 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.
- mtts 13y agoUrdu, I'm told by someone who speaks the language, is Hindi written in Arabic script.
- Osmium 13y agoCould well be true! I'm not qualified to speak about that. Looking it up, seems like I mis-spoke when I said Urdu was Dravidian. But there are a lot of Indian languages that are (e.g. Kannada), so the overall point stands that the "averaging" comment is a bit misleading. Incidentally, your comment led me to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi–Urdu_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi–Urdu_controversy which you may find interesting.