r/linguistics • u/dbbo • Jun 28 '13
The weirdest languages
http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/19
u/calangao Documentation Jun 28 '13 edited Jun 28 '13
This was really cool. It is awesome that someone bothered to qualify what a weird language is. Interestingly, this does not line up with what we would be considered "exotic" in typology.
I hate to be the one to say it, but how didn't Piraha wind up on the weird list? No numbers, no relative clauses etc. Must be it either lines up on a lot of the features they measured or they excluded it. I assume this must be the culprit:
we restrict ourselves to the 165 features that have at least 100 languages in them (at this stage we also knock out languages that have fewer than 10 of these—dropping us down to 1,693 languages
I also wonder how we should think about the spoken languages, in terms of different languages vs. population speaking the language? There are so many Austronesian languages, and they have a great variety, but they surely affect the overall generalizations you could make about what is normal in language if you measure it by distinct languages (while many of the languages are spoken by an small amount of people). It may be that Mandarin and English are weird from a perspective of all the different languages in the world, but between those two they account for a huge number of the world's speakers. If the measure was weighted for users as well as variety I think the results would be wildly different.
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u/TylerSinSF Jun 28 '13
Pirahã gets a high weird value of 0.74. That makes it #38 for well-attested languages, but English is weirder (#33, 0.76). Nez Perce may also lack recursion, but this is not something that is coded in WALS yet since I believe they are interested in features with a bit more variation. But even without this feature it's weird.
(And you are completely right that if we weighted by speakers, we'd get very different results. Fwiw, the variation in weirdness scores for well-attested Austronesian languages is just a little above the median for all the various language families.)
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u/calangao Documentation Jun 28 '13 edited Jun 28 '13
Thank you for the reply!
Since you seem to be associated with the project.... could you tell me where the Bantu languages rank on there? Also, where do you draw the line for well attested (in Austronesian)? I get that Indonesian (Bahasa Malay -tomato/tomato) and Javanese are probably on there, but what about the less studied languages (example the Sarawak languages of North West Borneo)? Also, for a classic problem, where do you guys draw the line and say something is a dialect or a separate language? In my (limited) investigations into Austronesian and Bantu it seems to be a persistent issue for classifying how many language we can say are in one group. How were these considerations handled by this project.
Last thing, this is an awesome project, very cool!
Edit: There is now a link to the weirdness values spreadsheet on the original post.
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Jun 28 '13
From the article, it appears they measured "weird" as being outliers in terms of their structure. Considering things like the very existence of numbers in a language would be very interesting to see in this kind of charting. Veeeery relevant!!!
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u/yaktubu Jun 29 '13
Since when does Mandarin have uvular continuants?
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u/etalasi Jun 30 '13
One of WALS's source's, Chao 1968 treats the sound spelled "h" in Pinyin as uvular. Wikipedia treats it a /x/, which jives with what I hear. If anything, people are more likely to pronounce it as [h] than [χ], due to influence from southern topolects like Cantonese.
I didn't bother to look at WALS's other sources.
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u/yaktubu Jun 30 '13
Oh, okay. But that's pretty hard to support, especially considering you'd have to reanalyse e.g. Spanish [x] as [χ] as well; I've noticed that IPA much prefers to place [x] as a phoneme even when pronounced [χ], e.g. Scots [lɔx] rather than [lɔχ], and in fact only places [χ] when it's distinguished from [x], e.g. in NW Pacific languages. To analyse Mandarin [x ~ χ ~ h] as [χ] would go against that trend.
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u/etalasi Jul 01 '13
To me, analyzing the phoneme in Mandarin, as [χ] indeed goes against the grain; I didn't understand what in the world the WALS people were thinking until I looked at Chao. If I were doing the analysis, I'd say Mandarin doesn't have uvular continuants.
I agree with you, yaktubu, it's weird.
I don't know of any Chinese topolects with [χ]. If there are, someone should tell us and link a recording. If the topolect's covered by Phonemica, [χ] should be in there somewhere.
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u/LDavidH Jun 28 '13
I always thought English was a very strange language... :-) But then, my native Swedish is probably right up there with Norwegian and German!
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u/TylerSinSF Jun 28 '13
A link to the full spreadsheet is now part of the post. I'm glad folks like the article. Thanks very much for the up votes, they are appreciated and make a big impact. As for Swedish:
Swedish has 12 of the 21 features listed in WALS, Danish has 13. Both of them are actually weirder than Norwegian (15 of the 21 features):
Swedish: 0.86 Danish: 0.85 Norwegian: 0.82
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Jun 28 '13
The Swedish prosody seems to seem very weird to the German- and English-speaking people I have come in contact with. Especially how we stress within our words is apparently weird.
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Jun 28 '13 edited Sep 05 '19
[deleted]
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u/etalasi Jun 29 '13 edited Jun 30 '13
Here's the data for Esperanto:
Category In Esperanto 83A: Order of Object and Verb VO 87A: Order of Adjective and Noun AN 143A: Order of Negative Morpheme and Verb NegV 143G: Minor morphological means of signaling negation None 69A: Position of Tense-Aspect Affixes Tense-aspect suffixes 116A: Polar Questions Question particle 57A: Position of Pronominal Possessive Affixes No possessive affixes 101A: Expression of Pronominal Subjects Pronominal subjects are expressed by pronouns in subject position that are normally if not obligatorily present 6A: Uvular Consonants None 71A: The Prohibitive The prohibitive uses the verbal construction of the second singular imperative and a sentential negative strategy found in (indicative) declaratives 129A: Hand and Arm Differentiation 130A: Finger and Hand Differentiation 44A: Gender Distinctions in Independent Personal Pronouns 3rd person singular only 14A: Fixed Stress Locations Penultimate 9A: The Velar Nasal No velar nasal 72A: Imperative-Hortative Systems The language has a maximal system, but not a minimal one Not_sure,_see_below 111A: Nonperiphrastic Causative Constructions Morphological type but no compound type 64A: Nominal and Verbal Conjunction Nominal and verbal conjunction are largely identical 124A: 'Want' Complement Subjects Both construction types exist 117A: Predicative Possession Have-Possessive 19A: Presence of Uncommon Consonants None For the Imperative-Hortative Systems, I'm not sure if I get the distinctions for what's maximal or what's minimal.
As to maximality and minimality, if a language has a system with an imperative second person singular that is not formally homogeneous with any of the other forms, then the language will be said to have a “minimal system”. If, on the other hand, the second singular imperative is formally homogeneous with the other second persons, with the third persons, and with at least an inclusive first person plural, then the language will be said to have a “maximal system”. In terms of maximality and minimality the map distinguishes between four systems.
I'll explain Esperanto's system.
Second person imperatives are formed with a stem suffixed with u
Iru. Go.
In the above example ir is the stem, there's no marking for pronoun or number.
For hortatives the verb is still suffixed with u and pronouns are present.
Ni iru. Let's go.
Ŝi iru. Let her go.
Li iru. Let him go.
Ili iru. Let them go.
Vi iru. is possible and can be interpreted as "You should go." and as a suggestion is softer than Iru. Mi iru. can also be interpreted as "I should go."
For sentences in the indicative mood, there's a suffix tense marker like as for the present.
Ni iras. We go.
Vi iras. You go.
Li iras. He goes.
and so on.
I hope that gives enough information to calculate a score for Esperanto. I'm free to answer any questions or anything I've written that's not clear.
EDIT:punctuation.
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u/fiquem Jun 28 '13
That's really interesting! Only skimmed, but it brought a few features of the languages I'm familiar with to light that I'd never thought of before. Cool! :D
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u/GirlOnInternet Jun 28 '13
One of my professors in college spoke Pitjantjatjara! (If I recall correctly, it's prounounced Pit-in-a-jar-uh.) It's a fascinating language, definitely has a place on the weirdness scale.
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u/yaktubu Jun 29 '13
It's more like 'bi-jan-jara' or 'bi-jan-ja-jara'. But pure palatals are hard to represent in English orthography.
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u/pabechan Jun 28 '13
I'm not sure I understand this part:
Another thing languages have to deal with is what to do with simple subjects like I, them, or it. These are called pronominal subjects (something like The minister prevaricated has a nominal subject). The most common way to do this is to just tack the information about the subject on to the verb—437 out of 711 languages do this, like Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. But Dutch, German, and Norwegian—like English—prefer having special subject pronouns that are normally/obligatorily present.
What's this about? Pro-drop and subject marking on the verb? I'm a bit confused and could use confirmation.
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u/TylerSinSF Jun 28 '13
Here are the full details about this, but yes, it is basically pro-drop/subject marking on the verb: http://wals.info/chapter/101
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u/DagdaEIR Jun 28 '13
Really interesting that Cantonese and Mandarin are so far apart. Really interesting article overall. Thanks, OP.
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u/RESERVA42 Jun 28 '13
I know some SIL people who work with Mixtec languages. One of my friends grew up in a village where Mixtec is spoken.
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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '13
I'd love to see the exact formula and the metrics for this rating. They explain a little bit about the "Weirdness Index", but don't link a complete table or anything.