<div dir="ltr"><h1>What's the world's weirdest language?</h1>
<span class="">Rick Moran</span><br>
<div class="">
<p><span style="font-family:times new roman,times"><span style="font-size:medium">This is a fascinating <span class="" id="IL_AD4">article</span> in <a href="http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/01/do_you_speak_the_world_s_weirdest_language">Foreign Policy</a>
of all places, that reports on a researcher who coded in 21 different
factors relating to 239 different languages to come up with what he
calls the "weirdest" language spoken in the world.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:times new roman,times"><span style="font-size:medium"> </span></span></p>
<blockquote>
<p><span style="font-family:times new roman,times"><span style="font-size:medium">Are
you one of the 6,000 people in the world who speaks Chalcatongo Mixtec?
Congratulations! You speak the world's weirdest language.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:times new roman,times"><span style="font-size:medium">That's what <a href="https://twitter.com/TSchnoebelen" target="_blank">Tyler Schnoebelen</a> and the researchers at <a href="https://twitter.com/idibon" target="_blank">Idibon</a>, a natural language processing company, <a href="http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/" target="_blank">found</a> when they statistically compared 239 languages to see how like or unlike they were to one another. Using the <a href="http://wals.info/" target="_blank">World Atlas of Language Structures</a>, Idibon coded the languages for 21 <span class="" id="IL_AD3">characteristics</span>
including, for example, how subjects, objects, and verbs are ordered in
a sentence, or how a language makes clear that a sentence is a
question.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:times new roman,times"><span style="font-size:medium">When
Schnoebelen ran the numbers, Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken in Oaxaca,
Mexico, was the least like the majority of the world's other languages.
And it <em>is</em> pretty unusual: Schnoebelen describes it as a
"verb-initial tonal language" that has no mechanism for demonstrating
questions (so "You are alright." and "Are you alright?" sound the exact
same). "I have spent part of the day imagining a game show in this
language," Schnoebelen wrote in his analysis (for more on how to say
everything from "I am sick" to "I bought many long ropes" in Chalcatongo
Mixtec, <a href="http://wals.info/example/all/wals_code_mxc" target="_blank">see here</a>).
It's probably not surprising that some of the strangest languages are
some of the most obscure. The second weirdest is Nenets, spoken in
Siberia, followed by Choctaw, a Native American language from the
central plains.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:times new roman,times"><span style="font-size:medium">But
some of the weirdest languages are widely spoken. The seventh-strangest
language, Kongo, is spoken by half a million people in Central Africa.
After that comes Armenian, then German. English ranks fairly high as
well, coming in 33rd. There's also no particular region of strange
languages -- the top 25 weirdest (pictured with red dots in the <span class="" id="IL_AD1">map</span>
below) are scattered across every continent. Mandarin is one of the
strangest languages, while Cantonese is one of the most "normal." And
linguistic families are also no guarantee of similarity. Schnoebelen
notes that while Germanic languages are all pretty weird, Romance
languages run the full breadth of the strangeness spectrum, from
Spanish, which falls in the Weirdness Index's top 25, down to
Portuguese, which ranked as one of the most mundane languages.</span></span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span style="font-family:times new roman,times"><span style="font-size:medium"> </span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:times new roman,times"><span style="font-size:medium">I'd
love to meet this fellow Tyler Schnoebelen. Anyone who tries to imagine
a game show in one of the most obscure languages in the world has to be
a fascinatating guy to sit next to on a bar stool. </span></span></p></div><br>Read more: <a style="color:rgb(0,51,153)" href="http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/07/whats_the_worlds_weirdest_language.html#ixzz2XzisQcfb">http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/07/whats_the_worlds_weirdest_language.html#ixzz2XzisQcfb</a>
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