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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
by Osmium 13y ago
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.
- 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.