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English is weird
Case:
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 24 Apr 2019, 06:29 ---
--- 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.
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That would be part of it.
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Well, yes - obviously, my brain being weird as f**k is a contributing factor. We can take that as a given. :-D
Gyrre:
It's interesting that most (if not all) forms of non-rhotic English are viewed as sounding uneducated in the USA. Examples; any form of Southern or rural drawl, Jersey, Bostonian (non-Harvard), African-American Vernacular, Valley Talk, and that one little island off the coast of Maine.
Is it cold in here?:
It would be interesting to construct some sort of metric combining how weird a language is with how many speakers it has. English might not win.
Case:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 02 May 2019, 22:12 ---It would be interesting to construct some sort of metric combining how weird a language is with how many speakers it has. English might not win.
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I think that was one of the points of the article - that the 'main' Euro-languages are actually pretty weird (i.e. they share few features with other languages). The least weird language is apparently Hindi.
--- Quote ---Part of this is to say that some of the languages you take for granted as being normal (like English, Spanish, or German) consistently do things differently than most of the other languages in the world.
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Cornelius:
Out of curiosity, I've taken the list from the article, and for the languages with data for 14 or more of their selected features, filled in the number of native speakers (based off of wikipedia, but then numbers of native speakers for a lot of languages are only estimates anyway.)
That gives an average weirdindex between 0.48 and 0.60, except for the languages with between 100 M and 1000M speakers, which average at 0.788.
Those are:
* Spanish: 0,7897
* Mandarin: 0,7884
* English: 0,7562
* Japanese: 0,7356
* Russian: 0,4006
* Hindi: 0,0872
The least weird group is, surprisingly, the languages that no longer have any native speakers, averaging at 0.4801
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