"Are you one of the 6,000 people in the world who speaks Chalcatongo Mixtec? Congratulations! You speak the world’s weirdest language. That’s what Tyler Schnoebelen and the researchers at Idibon, a natural language processing company, found when they statistically compared 239 languages to see how like or unlike they were to one another."
That's from an article HERE - it describes the findings of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) ... "a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors. WALS Online is a publication of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Can you imagine ranking all the languages to decide which are the most 'difficult'. WALS evaluates 2,676 languages in terms of 192 linguistic features.
We are fascinated by the most weird. There are languages that are the "least weird"- these include Cantonese, Hungarian, Chamorro, and Imbabura Quechua.
And where does English stand in terms of weird? It is ranked 33 out of 239 languages, so is determined by WALS to be weird, with more than 80% of its features being uncommon in other languages. That explains the hundreds and hundreds of great grammar jokes. But I've chosen just one:
An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."
A voice from the back of the room said, "Yeah, right."
Today we have railroad pictures from the Hickory convention. I like the first picture showing the scale of the Sundance layout.
