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English is weird
Cornelius:
It's interesting, but looking into the full list, there's a couple of surprises. I think some languages might need some more work. And perhaps based off of the efforts that have been made to exhaustively list all features (descriptively), rather than on a 1958 introduction to the language.
Then again, the image might skew a bit, as the database does take into account some, but not all, different variants for some languages, begging the question, which variant did this list take into account or not?
cybersmurf:
Well, that list seems a bit weird. Hungarian among the ten least weird languages? Admittedly, I don't know that language, but AFAIK the closest relative language to Hungarian is Finnish. OK, being that far down the tree, and basically being the only one left doesn't make a language weird necessarily, but I also heard it's hard to learn (but again that could be attributed to its uniqueness).
The weirdest part about English IMHO is the spelling. AFAIK the spelling didn't undergo the changes the spoken language did, thus weirdness ensued.
Cornelius:
Then again, they only picked 21 out of 192 language features to compare against. Pick another 21, and you'll have a completely different image.
Case:
--- Quote from: cybersmurf on 24 Apr 2019, 01:16 ---The weirdest part about English IMHO is the spelling. AFAIK the spelling didn't undergo the changes the spoken language did, thus weirdness ensued.
--- End quote ---
They mention that in another article - that English has five vowel-letters, but uses eleven vowel-phonemes.
To me, the weirdest thing about English is the word-order - not because it's complicated, but because it's not. It's rigidly Subject-Verb-Object. I just found out that German is alternating between SVO and SOV (with other possible combinations). Now I know why my brain insists on trying out 'perfectly logical' ways of constructing English sentences that end up sounding weirdAF.
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 24 Apr 2019, 01:23 ---Then again, they only picked 21 out of 192 language features to compare against. Pick another 21, and you'll have a completely different image.
--- End quote ---
IIRC, in another article, the authors acknowledge that their acculturation may skew their choice of features in ways they can neither recognize, nor compensate for. That African linguists e.g. might choose a completely different set of features.
Cornelius:
--- Quote from: Case on 24 Apr 2019, 05:51 ---IIRC, in another article, the authors acknowledge that their acculturation may skew their choice of features in ways they can neither recognize, nor compensate for. That African linguists e.g. might choose a completely different set of features.
--- End quote ---
Which is rather hard. In trying to be less Anglo-centric, they may have selected, subconsciously, for the features that will prove it to be an outlier.
And then again, it's also a question of which features do they have data for. Much though I like the concept of the atlas, I dare say, looking at the entries for Dutch, it's not complete, and I'm not convinced the sources they quote in the entries are necessarily the most up to date or even correct. But that's going by a sample of one, and only means that there's room for improvement. Like, for instance, including all major variants of a language. I'm not saying they should have every dialect, though. While massively interesting, that's another level of detail entirely.
Then again, the fact that it is incomplete, does have its own implications for the data of this list.
--- Quote from: Case on 24 Apr 2019, 05:51 ---To me, the weirdest thing about English is the word-order - not because it's complicated, but because it's not. It's rigidly Subject-Verb-Object. I just found out that German is alternating between SVO and SOV (with other possible combinations). Now I know why my brain insists on trying out 'perfectly logical' ways of constructing English sentences that end up sounding weirdAF.
--- End quote ---
That would be part of it.
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