The Most Batshit Natlang Competition!

[TaylorS]

Well not only that but introduction of letters that were never there e.g. island.

You can explain how English orthography got the way it is but can you really find a worse orthography? Can you even find ten than are in the same league?

Tibetan's orthography is pretty bad.

[----]

Swedish's consonants seem very complex to me, particularly that sj-sound which has a lot of different ways of spelling it.

Well they're all pretty similar and it's pronounced the same as <rs> in Northern dialects I believe.
Danish is definitely crazy though, just what the heck

[Ser]

Maybe Chinese/Japanese are in a slightly different league, since it's all about logography and memorisation, but don't try telling me that's less complicated than the English system.

If you're to put Chinese and Japanese on a different league, that'd be because they're a level above in difficulty that of Thai, Burmese and English. Not changing your orthography for 3000+ years is absolutely insane (in the case of Standard Chinese, and no, "Communist" China's simplifications didn't help much, for some stupid reason they preferred to concentrate on just decreasing the number of strokes for standard 楷書 kǎishū-style characters instead of making the connections between the phonetic parts of characters easier by decreasing their number and increasing their regularity), as well as borrowing from such a language a good 1000+ years after it had been developed (in the case of Japanese).

[spats]

English doesn't even come close; sure it's got a couple of weird or uncommon phonemes (but really, /T/ and /D/ aren't that uncommon, so it's really mostly /r/), the odd vowel inventory, the weird no-plural-distinction-in-2P-pronouns thing (except that in most dialects, it actually does), and the marking-the-third-person-singular-but-nothing-else thing, which is super weird, but whatever.

Honestly, I think the hodgepodge spelling (esp with modern loanwords) and massive number of irregular verbs are probably the oddest things about it. It's not even as "unusual" as German in the documents cited above.

What's more interesting to me, honestly, is how not unusual the languages we usually think of as unusual actually are, from a WALS perspective. English, Japanese, Arabic - not so unusual. But German, Hebrew*, Chinese - totally weird!

* actually, I'm probably misreading the chart and they're rather talking about various types of Levantine Arabic, but I could be wrong.

[Ser]

English, Japanese, Arabic - not so unusual.

Who's said they aren't strange in their own ways?

[spats]

English, Japanese, Arabic - not so unusual.

Who's said they aren't strange in their own ways?

According to one of the sources above, which did a statistical analysis based on WALS.

Which admittedly, they hedge by saying WALS itself might be biased...

[jmcd]

Burmese, Thai and Tibetan still stand.

There are also some others from the region, although I think Lao recently-ish had a spelling reform and I'm not sure about Khmer. There must be some Indian languages with relatively wacky scripts. I mean, it's difficult to tell with all of them strictly speaking since they've all got different structures. I think what does it for Burmese, Thai and Tibetan is the fact that they have had the script for 1000 years without changing it much and they're tonal, and the marking of tone is rarely ever simple.

I mean I think Thai is regular, but it's far more complex than English, which I guess is a different question.

Yeah it was more irregularity that I was thinking of than complexity. I think some languages could have longer rule sets but English would have one of the lowest predictability percentages. Though Serafín does make a good point.

Yeah I wasn't counting Chinese or Japanese because it's not just a matter of difficulty but one of phoneme/grapheme correspondence. But I didn't really make that clear. Basically, I mean if you do this with the vast majority of orthographies, you'll get a better than 85%. I was thinking myself of French and Gaelic as competitors. But Swedish isn't too bad AFAICT. They don't have a schwa phoneme, which causes a sgnificant amount of confusion in English. And where schwa appears allophonically, it appears to be basically predictable.

Swedish's consonants seem very complex to me, particularly that sj-sound which has a lot of different ways of spelling it.

But most of them are either a) rare to the point of only appearring in five words or even just one or b) only appear in loanwords which follow the original orthography. The only ones that are actually normal in native Swedish words are <sj> before all vowels and <sk> before front vowels.

[Miekko]

Swedish's consonants seem very complex to me, particularly that sj-sound which has a lot of different ways of spelling it.

Well they're all pretty similar and it's pronounced the same as <rs> in Northern dialects I believe.

<rs> in northern dialects is some variety of [s`]. <sj> is something entirely different.

[Miekko]

[xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]. Nothing more needs to be said.

But that doesn't come close to some of the crazier words in NW Caucasian or Ubykh, et al.

Yes it does, as NW Caucasian and Ubykh have much too strict phonotax for that. Notice how, in the scholarly topic of phonology, it's Salishan that's making linguists wonder whether 'syllables' are a universal at all, not Ubykh or NW Caucasian.

[Soap]

I vote for Angoram, as described at http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php?p=889799#p889799

[finlay]

English doesn't even come close; sure it's got a couple of weird or uncommon phonemes (but really, /T/ and /D/ aren't that uncommon, so it's really mostly /r/), the odd vowel inventory, the weird no-plural-distinction-in-2P-pronouns thing (except that in most dialects, it actually does), and the marking-the-third-person-singular-but-nothing-else thing, which is super weird, but whatever.

Right; we seem to have this idea that English is difficult, mainly from the orthography, but it's really easy to teach and learn in comparison to a lot of other languages.

One such reason is because it's 95% isolating, so you don't have to focus on inflection and agreement as much as you do in a lot of other languages, and you can concentrate on getting the meanings/usages of the different tenses down.

French, for instance, has about as many tenses but you have to learn a whole new paradigm for each one – or at least it certainly feels like that – and this is without getting to the fact that a. a lot of the paradigms have silent letters, meaning that it's simple in spoken French and complex in written French and b. the tenses don't actually mean the same things as they do in English despite being transparently derived from the same periphrastic construction.

One thing I was told during my TEFL course was that you shouldn't actually say to students that English is difficult, or what you're trying to teach is difficult. Because it's really not.

[Qwynegold]

Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Thai, Tibetan, French, Gaelic in all its flavours (Irish, Scottish, maybe Manx), Swedish, Danish, Norwegian

I agree on Japanese. Not only is it logographic, but there are several pronunciations for every character, unlike in Chinese. I disagree on Swedish though, it is quite complicated, but I think it's one level below English.

[Qwynegold]

Oh, and I'll vote for Mohawk.

[merijn]

+1 for English. Or at least the western Germanic languages.

1. Northwestern European languages are weird: perfect tense with "have", inverting word order to form polar questions, relative pronouns.
http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs ... 219098.411
http://web.mac.com/cysouw/publications/ ... FS2005.pdf
.

It is funny to see Zulu mentioned as one of the centers of areas of rareness in that article. Weird things in grammar I always call "wtf-features", that is features of a language that make you go wtf. I think Zulu has a very normal grammar, and it, and other South-African Bantu languages, don't have a few of the wtf-features other Bantu languages have such as subject-object reversal and locative noun classes. I don't think however that WALS has maps for those features because they are too rare, and one of the reasons why north-west Europe seems to be so weird may be that they do have maps for those features that are restricted to Western Europe.

I vote for Angoram, as described at http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php?p=889799#p889799

From the examples quoted it is not any weirder than any language with noun classes and object agreement; for instance the majority of Bantu languages.
Your examples in Zulu:
I saw my two women
ngibabonile abesifazane bami ababili
I saw my two frogs
ngiwabonile amaxoxo ami amabili
I saw my two gardens
ngizibonile izingadi zami ezimbili.

[Bristel]

[xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]. Nothing more needs to be said.

But that doesn't come close to some of the crazier words in NW Caucasian or Ubykh, et al.

Yes it does, as NW Caucasian and Ubykh have much too strict phonotax for that. Notice how, in the scholarly topic of phonology, it's Salishan that's making linguists wonder whether 'syllables' are a universal at all, not Ubykh or NW Caucasian.

If that word has no underlying phonemes, then sure, but I believe that most Salish suffixes have underlying forms that aren't apparent in words like [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]

[cromulant]

I vote for Angoram, as described at http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php?p=889799#p889799

From the examples quoted it is not any weirder than any language with noun classes and object agreement; for instance the majority of Bantu languages.
Your examples in Zulu:
I saw my two women
ngibabonile abesifazane bami ababili
I saw my two frogs
ngiwabonile amaxoxo ami amabili
I saw my two gardens
ngizibonile izingadi zami ezimbili.

Let's compare their agreement systems:

Code: Select all

ame       akwum          kuvambakwum    sumupar   amenakwum      salikəmba
ame       pwanggli       kəpanggli      klupar    amenakanggli   salikənggliya
ame       konggəmbər     kəvambər       pələpar   amenkəmbər     salikəmbəra

^Where the second word is the noun that triggers the agreement.

IMO, Angoram is the more batshit of the two.

[merijn]

I vote for Angoram, as described at http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php?p=889799#p889799

From the examples quoted it is not any weirder than any language with noun classes and object agreement; for instance the majority of Bantu languages.
Your examples in Zulu:
I saw my two women
ngibabonile abesifazane bami ababili
I saw my two frogs
ngiwabonile amaxoxo ami amabili
I saw my two gardens
ngizibonile izingadi zami ezimbili.

Let's compare their agreement systems:

Code: Select all

ame       akwum          kuvambakwum    sumupar   amenakwum      salikəmba
ame       pwanggli       kəpanggli      klupar    amenakanggli   salikənggliya
ame       konggəmbər     kəvambər       pələpar   amenkəmbər     salikəmbəra

^Where the second word is the noun that triggers the agreement.

IMO, Angoram is the more batshit of the two.

You are right, but that is only a handful of paradigms, comparable to languages with different paradigms for subject agreement in different tenses. It doesn't add that much batshit insanity IMO.

[Miekko]

[xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]. Nothing more needs to be said.

But that doesn't come close to some of the crazier words in NW Caucasian or Ubykh, et al.

Yes it does, as NW Caucasian and Ubykh have much too strict phonotax for that. Notice how, in the scholarly topic of phonology, it's Salishan that's making linguists wonder whether 'syllables' are a universal at all, not Ubykh or NW Caucasian.

If that word has no underlying phonemes, then sure, but I believe that most Salish suffixes have underlying forms that aren't apparent in words like [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]

That's irrelevant, though.

[chris_notts]

Yes it does, as NW Caucasian and Ubykh have much too strict phonotax for that. Notice how, in the scholarly topic of phonology, it's Salishan that's making linguists wonder whether 'syllables' are a universal at all, not Ubykh or NW Caucasian.

[/quote]

Some dialects of Berber have raised similar questions.

[marconatrix]

Oh, and I'll vote for Mohawk.

Uh? Iroquoian is cool, everything is a verb, I mean everything

OK, no labials is pretty weird, seeing as they're usually the first sounds babies make (are they?) and so ought to be the easiest of consonants?

[Nortaneous]

Yes it does, as NW Caucasian and Ubykh have much too strict phonotax for that. Notice how, in the scholarly topic of phonology, it's Salishan that's making linguists wonder whether 'syllables' are a universal at all, not Ubykh or NW Caucasian.

Some dialects of Berber have raised similar questions.

Wait, really? I thought Berber had predictable epenthetic vowels.

[Astraios]

Wait, really? I thought Berber had predictable epenthetic vowels.

They're not phonemic in every dialect (says some article somewhere on WP). I've been listening to a lot of Berber material lately and in some songs I've heard some of the same words with and without epenthetic schwas.

[Qwynegold]

Oh, and I'll vote for Mohawk.

Uh? Iroquoian is cool, everything is a verb, I mean everything

OK, no labials is pretty weird, seeing as they're usually the first sounds babies make (are they?) and so ought to be the easiest of consonants?

Yeah, and did you see the consonant clusters?

[Atom]

Oh, and I'll vote for Mohawk.

Uh? Iroquoian is cool, everything is a verb, I mean everything

OK, no labials is pretty weird, seeing as they're usually the first sounds babies make (are they?) and so ought to be the easiest of consonants?

Yeah, and did you see the consonant clusters?

*/ -Ɂtskhɹj- / isn't that weird. (although it should be noted that it's from proto-Iriquoian, not any modern language)

[Zumir]

Must... learn... Iroquoian.