What are the weirdest languages in the world?
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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2022
- A lot people call some languages weird, be it through sounds or through their features, but which languages have features so bizarre that they could be considered on of the weirdest in the world?
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Chilean Spanish clip: • El idioma español en C...
Taa clip: • Video
#language #languages #linguistics
Notes:
Pirahã is not even close to the language where tones take up the highest percentage of the phonemes, that goes to Iau, which has 6 consonants, 8 monophthongs, 11 diphthongs, and *8* tones, with 11 tone clusters
I should’ve also noted that field research on Pirahã is a bit limited, so some of the information might turn out to be inaccurate, as new studies come out about the language
Isn’t Portuguese also a little bit weird? and it doesn’t matter which Portuguese Brazilian or European they are also kinda weird
(Only in my opinion)
@@themurderer8697 why is that? i am a native speaker of portuguese, i don't see it as weird at all
@@sournois90 nobody thinks their own language is weird. I would say that if I wasn't a native Arabic speaker, I might find Arabic weird.
@@Moses_VII yes, but my case is a bit different. I've looked at other romance languages and portuguese is not anything special. it may be "weird" because of the fact that it has a more African root and its simplistic vibe. By simplistic, I mean several language reforms that would remove unnecessary letters and make the language standard in almost all of its orthography. Things like double t, ph, double f, and all these "fancy" things you don't see in portuguese
yes, the thing about "abstractions" is bullcrap
me: walking around a Spanish village, whistling peacefully
The locals wondering why I want to eviscerate their kitchen:
Lol
Why do you think spanish sounds like a whistling?
@@nyoman23gd93 Silbo Gomero en las Islas Canarias, 4:00
Anda que no puedes ni llegar hasta esa parte del vídeo
excellent 😂
@@nyoman23gd93 have you watched the video??
I personally deem english as a kind of weird - it's a germanic language with a frenchified nord-ish orthography and with a majority of the vocabulary derived from it and latin, tons of synonyms in the language itself and when a noun has a lot of discribing adjectives added to it, there's an unspoken rule of in what order the adjectives should go in some cases.
There's that joke that English is just three real languages stacked on top of each other and wearing a trench coat, trying to pass itself off as one language.
That's the same with the sino-xenic languages (Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) that borrow heavily from Chinese.
Lots of diphthongs and weird vowel combinations. Outdated orthography, too.
It's weird that they can say "Arched" /ɑɹt͡ʃt/ and "sixths" /sɪksθs/ and "script" /skɹɪpt/ but not a simple "tsunami" /tsu.na.mi/
English also likes to turn nouns into verbs and adjectives, and has some weird sounds, including (in American English at least) the "bunched r" sound, which I don't think appears in any language that's not been influenced by English (the retroflex r sounds similar but it's made with pretty different vocal mechanisms).
Kaixo! I am from the Basque Country and Basque is my mother tongue. I am always happy to see my beloved language represented internationally, especially as something "rare". Indeed it is, and not only that, it is considered by many linguists to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. I feel lucky to have grown up speaking it, because now I would be unable to learn it because of its complexity. Milesker!
Baina oso zaila da eta eskolan ez dute ondo azaltzen
Zuk jakin izan dozu deabruaren istorioa? Ze nik ez.
@@jonretolaza3238 wait, "istorioa" means story right? That's interesting!
@@Eulers_Identity Indeed! Even if some of our words are very ancient, there are still lots of them that come from Latin. In this particular case, historīa, Basque got rid of the "h" and transformed the "a" into an "o": istorio. I said "istorioa" because that "-a" is actually a suffix, what in English would be the article THE. So, "istorioa" means "The story".
@@jonretolaza3238 Really interesting! Thank you for clarifying!
Turkish also has a whistled version. Spoken in only a small region in Turkey, it's almost extinct. I hope both the Spanish and Turkish whistle languages can be saved. Whistled language, which is based on an existing language is the most unique way to communicate.
ne bölgede ıslıkla konuşuyorlar?
@@denizsincar29 capadocia?
@@denizsincar29 Karadeniz kuş dili diye biliyorum
Azerilerde Türkçeye yakın dilleri var
I knew about whisked Turkish before whistled Spanish
This is a great video but Pirahã is (in my opinion) not that strange when you consider its context. If you have ever watched a video where people from hunter gatherer communities are interviewed, they usually don't have words for abstractions either, many of them don't even understand what an abstraction is, and can only describe a negative feeling like sadness or anger through a survival situation like "running out of food" or "not being able to hunt an animal", considering how inhospitable the Amazon was until the 20th century, there's a chance that the Pirahã language simply didn't have the need for features such as abstract ideas, specific kinship and even colors, and even if some of the speakers have moved onto urban or agricultural lives, they still haven't had time to develop new features that adapt to their new context.
If this were true then you would expect most other languages from groups in similar situations to have those same properties. Do they?
@@kyle-silver Honestly I do not know
@@kyle-silver Usually we would expect this, yes. I mean, looking back to the Ancient Greek writings, you can see the creation of various abstract ideas. Honestly, a large portion of languages didn’t have these abstract ideas, but we’ve used loan words and created new words, like in ‘Ōlelo Hawa’i and Cherokee.
Edit: Just for clarity, most languages that are in similar situation are usually minority languages from rural places and only develop more complex abstractions when the vast majority of their speakers become multilingual in languages that have abstractions. For instance, most Native Americans now have access to education and are bilingual or trilingual in the United States and Canada, so more abstractions have been created to be used in the language. Same thing is happening in many African countries and South East Asia, as the youth begin to get more access to schooling.
I just think that "they don't understand what an abstraction is" is a very paternalistic oversimplification. And it's not true. All human beings have the capacity for abstract thought and logical deduction, even if their language doesn't express it in terms that are easy for you to understand.
@@kyle-silver Yes and I'm sorry it came off that way, I'm sure that it is understood but perhaps not of utmost importance so they would have a harder time communicating those concepts through language
The virgin Basque-Icelandic pidgin versus the chad Algonquian-Basque pidgin
Basque tryna copulate with every language in the world lmao
😆😆
@@franciscodecomayaguela9496 As basque im not only proud that my culture survived the entire history, but how we manage the contact with the rest of cultures along history, no one had asimilate us, we never try to asimilate others. Pretty chad mindset, in my own opinion.
@@asierurteaga1227I agree, my last name is “Urrutia” and is the name of a town in the Basque part of Spain. It means distant or far away place. I am proud to be part Basque!
The Lad Basque-Afro Nigerian Pidgin
I'm a native Icelandic speaker and I still consider English kind of weird, especially the fact that there are so many silent letters, double vocabulary, weird spelling and the changing vowels. I learned English as a kid and these things still fascinate and confuse me.
what's funny about that is that the older versions of modern Icelandinc and English, where very close related (Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon respectively)
U also share some other phonetic sounds like thorn and eth like English, but the later evolved to just "th"
@@jpracing9753 Absolutely! Icelandic and English are close cousins. One simply was contained on a hostile island while the other had influences from different directions.
There are words that are the same in Icelandic and English. Steak in Icelandic is steik. Pronounced the same. Others exist although not at the top of my head.
The Þ/Ð sounds do come easy to us. Made learning English easier for sure. :)
According to your struggles with English, French would be infamously difficult to learn. Native French speakers (like me) have trouble with our OWN language.
And don't forget that every grammar/orthographic rule in French can be explained in less than a minute. Listing the exceptions of said rule takes an hour xD
@@urkoma Weirdest Germanic language is English for sure, and I speak 4 of them and understand pieces of most.
Yes, English is definitely weird, but a lot of that is due to the fact that English has been influenced by so many different languages, all with very different rules of spelling and pronunciation. You're lucky that your ancestors decided to keep Icelandic pure, so that today you can read the Eddas with no problem. English speakers need a translation to read literature from so long ago.
Cool video! Lots lots lots of languages that you didn't mention that I find fascinating:
- Celtic Languages: sound beautiful, fun grammar, and consonant mutations
- Navajo: Really really cool grammar
- Georgian for the sheer complexity of its grammar as well
- Polynesian languages. ALL OF THEM
- Yele for everything
Really? My family speaks around 5 Polynesian languages, and it's cool, but I always found it pretty normal in terms of languages. Could you elaborate?
@@maapauu4282 I don’t have any favourites. Polynesian grammar fascinates me, simple and elegant. While not strictly Austronesian the incredible diversity of Papuan languages is also a favourite
@@tsikli8444 Right?! Papua languages have such amazing doversity
@@tsikli8444also georgian for its insane consonant clusters 😆
Welsh consonant mutations are the thing I have to explain the second most to my non-Welsh friends. The first? The orthography. There’s a town near where I’m from called Ysbyty Ystwyth which I like to pull out as an example (it’s pronounced usbuti ustwith, with the ‘u’s being schwas)
despite it being the most spoken language in the world (if you include non native speakers) english has an extra weird feature. it is called “do support” where instead of saying something like “i want it not” we say “i do not want” that do is extremely rare and is only really found in languages from the british isles, making some people think that it is a celtic feature that simply influenced english and was more widespread but later went extinct when the celtic languages declined in the first millennium bce
I once had a co-worker whose first language was Spanish. And he struggled to speak English. The situation inspired me to learn Spanish in the first place. I tried to teach him how English negates, and he was so utterly baffled. He simply couldn't understand why we negate using the verb "to do". I didn't realize that's it's such a weird feature. Negation in Spanish is so dang simple, isn't it???
East and West Flemish (the dialects), while not using do to form negations or questions, do use "do" to contradict a statement. The only form that still is relatively common is "toet" (from 't doet = it does), when saying a negative statement is wrong, similarly as using yes, it does in English, but in a more limited environment
im english and i never realised how funny english questions can be with do
@@callmeswivelhips8229 Question tags in English are incredibly complicated, whereas just the word "no" suffices in Spanish. For example: I am rich, aren't I? I'm not rich, am I? It's raining, isn't it? She will go, won't she? They had already eaten, hadn't they? It matters, doesn't it? It doesn't matter, does it? Most other languages simply use one word or expression for all these. Spanish would simply use "¿no?" French would just use "n'est-ce pas?"
negation using "to do" is also used in some german dialects
I would bet with you those people who called German weird have only heard it from screaming nazis in Hollywood movies
FOR REAL
I was having a good day until I heard the phrase “Basque Icelandic pidgin”, which immediately sent shockwaves throughout my body which would develop into tier 5 cancer, which I would never recover from.
Wait until you hear about basque algonquin pidgin
@@arthurheath7002 that goes than deep, that actual alqonquin gots even basque words in it.
I come from a Spanish English bilingual community, mainly Spanish, and I’ve experienced how subjective languages can be to different people first hand. When considering a third language to learn, a friend told me that I would find french way easier, so I took some classes and struggled horribly. Then one day I switched to German, and I had a super easy time, it just felt so much more intuitive. When I told my friend about this she was baffled, because she had actually taken some German and suffered a lot, only later switching to french and feeling way more in tune with it in comparison. Was a pretty eye opening experience.
Also if you want more examples of difficult Spanish accents, look up some Dominican. They talk so fast I can barely keep up, even if I memorized the slang
Nice. My third language was Spanish. Because my first language was Russian, in school we learned english and recently(couple of month ago) i started spanish and it was quite simple. Especially gender specific words as we have that in russian. Only thing that was weird to me is articles, like where to put "el, la, un, una" we don't have that in russian
For me french it's easy-
Maybe because I'm Dominican and we are taught french as a 2nd language after English and we are surrounded by the Haitian creole. And actually the majority of our french teachers are Haitians so perhaps that's why.
@@user-pp7gb8vy3i tbh it's fascinating, how many languages there are. Sometimes I just want to learn more about all of them and at least understand
I have a domimican friend. I shoud ask them about that.
written french shouldn't be too bad if you speak spanish, but man understanding what french people say is impossible. it's made even worse by the fact that a ton of french words have huge chunks of letters that are silent. so if you don't understand something you can't google it because you have no idea how to spell it. i do find that spanish grammer and german grammar are quite similar, at least french can be a bit odd at times.
I'm portuguese and when I was about 16yo I discovered Basque and was amazed and intrigued on how Basque endured for so long. Resisting the romanization and all... not even related to the celtic languages. It's really a mystery. So I've tried to learn it, and gave up after 2 weeks
Is it really that difficult?
@@mistercrazy456 imagine something really difficult...
basque is even worse.
I come from the basque country and even I cant even talk it very well
@@mistercrazy456 the thing about learning languages or anything in that matter, is that the more familiar something is to you, the easier it gets. Your background and exposure to something counts. For me, Castilian (or Spanish) is extremely easy, but for you it might be hard.
Basque is peculiar because, unfortunately it doesn't have a lot of exposure (music, films, taught in schools outside Vasconia, etc) and no language whatsoever is close to it, so the base vocabulary of the language is a completely different thing. Pretty fucking cool though
@@menesmasterpalhaconoobyaco2396 Damn, that really sucks haha. I'd like to go to Basque country someday, I think it would be a really interesting experience.
I’m a native Faroese speaker, and I think it’s pretty weird. The written language doesn’t match the spoken language very well, in that many of the day to day words aren’t “correct”, so they are considered spelling mistakes if you write them. The written language is much more formal than the spoken language.
Letters match the spoken sounds pretty poorly, and there are letters that are never pronounced consistently like “ð”. You simply have to remember where it’s supposed to be in a word, and thus is the most difficult part of the written language to learn. It has multiple sounds attached to it where other letters could be used instead, or simply no sound at all. An example “vegur” and “veður” (road and weather) are pronounced exactly the same, where the “ð” and “g” are pronounced as a “v” in this case. We learn when spelling, so it’s easier to remember, that the “g” points down to the road and that “ð” points up to the weather.
New words are regularly created, often from historical linguistic concepts, for new technologies and loan words are regularly purged from the language as well.
There is no “c, q, z, x or w” in the alphabet, but instead the added “á, ð, í, ó, ú, ý‚ æ, ø”.
Because of this, when loan words are used, like for “pizza” we write it “pitsa” because we aren’t allowed to use “z”. Squash (the vegetable/fruit) is written “skvassj” because it makes the same sound and we aren’t allowed to use “q”.
Watched from the sky in a sunny day those amazing islands on my way to Iceland. Could see some of them even through bridged connected! Hope to hike there at some point!
Lol the Chinese government is almost as controlling and authoritative as that
In the first paragraph you're basically describing English lol, and to be fair I think the written language not matching the spoken language very closely seems to be rare in the world. And even if it's not rare languages like English or French take it to a whole other level.
Language is going to have a great fall in the future as being too conservative with writing will end up failling
Most probably while the Sentinelese are isolated, it's impossible that they have literally isolated themselves from the outside world for 60,000 years. The genetic pool needs refreshment. There are actually records of them becoming more hostile and isolated when European explorers began to visit the area during the age of discovery. Most likely the Sentinelese along with their language are closely related to the Andamanese, their languages are obviously not mutually intelligible but I suggest a Finnish-Hungarian sort of relationship between them where nothing seems to cognate at first but you just scratch the surface a little bit and the similarities start to reveal themselves in droves.
Off the top of my head I seem to recall that there was an incident where some North Sentinelese were abducted by European explorers centuries ago and some have speculated that this contributed to their hostility to outsiders.
Edit: this was in 1880 and it was a British naval expedition. Six Sentinelese were abducted, of whom two died. The others were eventually returned to the island. Also, while the Sentinelese are famous for their hostility, there have been a few peaceful encounters with them as well. They seem to like receiving gifts, especially metal which they use to make tools. In one interesting case, a team of contractors who were hired to salvage a ship that wrecked near the island interacted with the Sentinelese on multiple occasions, who would come over on canoes to salvage metal scrap, and there was no apparent hostility between them.
A comentary on whistled Spanish: while silbo gomero is of course the most notable, Mexican Whistled Spanish is also a thing! As far as I know, it is not related to the canary variety, and instead it came from native Mexican languages, such as mixtec. Most people don't actually know it "fully", only a few words, curses, names, directions, stuff like that. Ceirtain kinds of whistles can help convey mood. I thought this was as deep as it went, however, the research I could gather describes more complex versions of this kind of comunication typical of rural areas (and therefore endangered).
At the beginning I didn't think it was special at all, but I asked some international online friends and they never heard of the concept. Such a cool thing, that whistled Spanish didn't only evolve once, but TWICE! And I think that's even weirder.
Woah, very cool!!
As an Esperantist, I think Esperanto is pretty weird. It orginates back to an eye doctor, the syntax is mostly romance but with a free-er word order, morphology is slavic, adjectives can be expressed as verbs (like Japanese or Korean), so forth. I could go on.
I don't think Esperanto counts since it's an artificial language, although there are a few native speakers, which I guess would make it the weirdest conlang!
@@polipod2074 Firstly, the correct term is “constructed”, all languages have an artificial nature to them. Goverments, scholars, schools, dictionaries, and language planning organizations, meddle with grammar, pronunciation, and orthography all the time since ancient times.
Secondly, the point is moot; Esperanto, like you mentioned, is a living language and has already undergone natural changes since coming into existence. For example, Esperanto didn’t originally have verbal adjectives; they were originally an example of poetic license in poetry and song, but they soon became popular in speech.
New pronouns and suffixes have even entered the language. “Ri/Rin”, a new pronoun, is Esperanto’s solution to the similar issue in English of singular “they/them” vs neopronouns.
i love esperanto. so similar to spanish and other languages 😂
Esperanto is only weird in its origin I'd say maybe the history? (I'm learning it :> )
@@MitchMV What’s a verbal adjective?
I love the weirdness index! (the one that ranks German 10th weirdest) it's one of the few non-anglocentric metrics out there, and while imperfect, does do a pretty good job of classifying languages based on their similarities and differences. (and the only reason we don't think German is weird is because English has so many "weird" quirks in common. Without checking, I want to say English landed in the high 30's)
Is there a list of languages with the most irregularities? Orthography doesn't count, because that's not a baked-in feature of the language itself. One of the reasons I gave up on German was, as I heard, about 45% of its verbs are irregular and its speakers aren't even regular in using the irregularities. Standard German was created by a committee that threw different features of different dialects (though, mostly High German, far from the Berlin capital). It had a chance to be regular! It was ruined by the same type of Learning-over-common-sense types that ruined English spelling
@@tomdouge6618 I'd say that creating A standartised German is impossible to begin with as there are many dialects that are completely mutually unintelligable.
What we've got now is like if you tried building a puzzle by randomly taking pieces from multiple different ones.
As a Basque speaker it's so cool seeing my language on a video
Apparently my family’s last name is basque do you know it? yrisarri
@@Treemaster16 yeah, if I'm correct it's a different spelling (maybe Iparralde/French Basque Coutry spelling) for Irrisarri, a town in Navarre
@@Treemaster16 Also the meaning of your surname could be "many smiles" or "always smiling"
I've set out to learn Mongolian recently after being pretty far into Russian, and I can say it is one of the most interesting/weird languages I've ever heard. Another language where the roots are dubiously connected at best to other languages, being theorized to either belong loosely to the same family as Korean, or Turkish, but no one really knows. I would suggest looking into how they say "thank you", versus how it's spelled, and how they say that they say "thank you". The channel NomiinGer is a great channel for learning the language, and for learning about Mongolia.
Here's another interesting language: Macanese Patois, or patuá. Called the sweet language, it's a Portuguese creole language, but it's more than just that! It's combined with Malay, Cantonese, and Sinhala too. This is the result of Macau being such an important colonial trading hub for the Portuguese. The language developed first mainly among the descendants of Portuguese settlers. They'd marry women from Portuguese Malacca, Portuguese India and Portuguese Ceylon rather than from neighboring China. The modern version arose in the late 19th century, when Macanese men began marrying Chinese women from Macau and the Pearl River Delta region. British influence from neighboring Hong Kong also added English words.
The language started to decline under the Estado Novo when standard Portuguese was imposed, and patuá became a language of resistance used to poke fun at the Portuguese authorities. It declined further as Macau was returned to China and the majority of Macau's population now being just ethnic Chinese, there were an estimated 50 according to UNESCO back in 2007. But there has been a revival effort, arguing that unlike Hong Kong, Macau has its own language and Macau's unique status as a 500-year-old bridge between Orient and the Occident justifies said effort to try to preserve it.
My own language (Dutch) is the weirdest to me. Just go ahead and try to wrap your head around words like "Patjepeeër" or "Grappenjatter"
"Afsluitdijk"
Traditiegetrouw, heggenschaar, braakliggend, slechtschrijvend of ontwenningsverschijnselen.
aansprakelijkheidswaardevaststellingsveranderingen
As a german it just sounds so cute
"nouns are objects by default" is a pretty weird way to explain ergativity
As far as attempts to explain ergativity in a single sentence to laymen go, I think it's decent.
Each language has its own spice.
To me - a native Polish speaker - a language that seems really "weird" is one which is actually spoken in a country which Poland shares quite a bit of history with. And before you say "Hungarian" - no it's not Hungarian (altho I love and currently study the Hungarian language). One of the weirdest things about this language is that by some it's actually considered to be a certain branch of slavic languages and it really does have this "eastern-slavic flavour" to its sound, but when I listen to it or when I look at it in its written form I'm unable to make out any words whatsoever, despite it being written in the latin script. YET if I put those same words I can't make out just by looking at them into a translator or an online dictionary, they suddenly start making sense to my Polish brain and I'm like "Oh! THAT'S how it works". The language I'm talking about is Lithuanian. And I actually find it very beautiful and really interesting to the point where I consider taking up learning it one day
Portuguese has 2 features that I find very weird:
- Personal infinitives (i.e., the infinitive form of the verb has different suffixes for different pronouns even when it's not conjugated in a specific tense)
- The number 2 has both a male and a female version
Why only the 2 tho
the number one also does, but that is more common in other languages. A female 2 is very unique to Portuguese
1 e 2 ter feminino e masculino concorda com o resto da lingua. Estranho seria se não fosse
é estranho porque os outros números não concordam, só o um e o dois (e alguns múltiplos de 100)
@@pedromenchik1961 é questão da fala tambem, do jeito que a lingua já é ficaria estranho um 3, 4 e todo o resto nos dois generos
As a Basque speaker, I have to say that you gave a good first impression of the language in your description, but you messed up the 2:17 sentence a bit:
• Dog = _txakur,_ the dog = _txakurra_ (-a is the definite singular article, the r is doubled to maintain the hard r sound).
• Same goes for bone = _hezur,_ the bone = *_hezurra,_*
• As you said, the ergative case declension is -(e)k. So the correct declension of "the dog" would be *_txakurrak._* The (e) is only used if the word ends with a consonant.
So the correct sentence would be:
*Txakurrak hezurra ikusi du* (dog+the+ERG, bone+the, see, has).
The ergative is a very special case because it affects the subject, whereas in other languages cases only affect the object. It's a way to mark which noun is the subject in a transitive sentence (in this case, the dog).
Agur bero bat euskaldun baten partetik!
in france there is a whistle language too, it is a bearnais dialect (bearnais is an occitan language spoken in the bearn, a region next to the basque country and I heard that they are rivals) spoken in the municipality of aas in a valley too
To me the weirdest language is English. Just look at the spelling and words don't seem to be related to one another, like tooth; dental or mouth; oral.
Well, as for the last case, English yoinked (read: got exposed to by way of Norman) Latin roots into it, which do not reflect the native Germanic roots... except they do. "dental" is related to "tooth" by means of the reconstruction *h₃dónts (see how "d" and "t" are articulated in the same place?).
"mouth" on the other hand is not related to "oral" but to Latin "mando" ("I eat"); "or" was lost in Middle English.
@@00Hundert influences from the rest of the world
I did not have to watch this video past 1 minute to like it. The fact you took the time to explain weirdness is subjective was enough for me. Well done on the rest of the video, haven't watched it yet, but already know it will be great! Cheers!
I'd like to suggest that you do a follow-up video on constructed languages that are "weird" (Toki Pona, Votgil, and anything else reviewed by Jaan Misli's Conlang Critic channel here on UA-cam)?
Could you please mix your voice to mono next time? The left channel is almost 1.5 times louder than right one. It doesn't ruin the video, but it's much more pleasing then the sound is balanced.
There's also a Algonquian-Basque pidgin, from their travels to Ternua (Newfoundland). Even the French used it at some point to communicate with native North Americans.
I love my language having so much history
Ergative languages [like BASQUE, KURDISH and GEORGIAN] are weird as fck.
But you can subordinate Kurdish language, an Indo-European language, wich is similar to other languages unlike Georgian and Basque
@@mortimer687 Wait until you learn about polypersonal agreement
But in some non-ergative (=accuzative) languages it is possible to build a construction, similar to ergative.
Accuzative sentence: A cat catches a mouse.
Quazi-ergative sentence: A mouse catches (it)selfby a cat.
Here the construction "self by" is like the preposition for ergative case.
Russian: 1) Кошка ловит мышку. 2) Мышка ловит ся кошкой.
Esperanto: 1) Kato kaptas muson. 2) Muso kaptas sinde kato.
Mongolian for me. Also the coolest sounding language.
Usually when I go to a foreign country and spend at least a week there I can pick up the rudiments of the language. Mongolian was one language I couldn't pick up.
@@janellek21 Right? It sounds so alienlike, in a good way of course haha
I would measure "weirdness" as uncommon features to evolve. It could be both intruitive and not intuitive. For example, a very regular language is not weird, intuitively, but apparently it definitely is in real life as they evolve. Something intuitively weird would be, Idk, a "th" sound evolving from a "m" sound perhaps? (not sure, not a linguist)
A weird thing (at least I think it is) I found is converting tl to kl, so for example a "tlan" could become a "klan" (or in Iraqi, "tlatheh" becomes "klaseh")
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx it could be an example of dissimilation, as both t and l are usually alveolar, so they might be difficult to either distinguish or say quickly
Basque actually did have a sister language: Aquitainian! It went extinct during the times of the Roman Empire.
A really weird language is one called Gibberish. It's primarily spoken in Washington DC. It consists of a lot of double speak.
Too bad it hasn’t become a dead language. One can hope.
As an Argentine with Basque grandparents, I can confirm that Basque is incredibly difficult.
Euskaldun-argentinarrak agurtzen zaituztet bizkaitik ❤❤👋👋
I live in Argentina and one of my friends also had Basque grandparents. He wanted to learn the language so he enrolled in classes at our local Centro Cultural Vasko. After about a month he gave up.
Basque -- During the Roman Empire, tribes called the Vascones (and related tribes) were in parts of Gaul and what would later be the Netherlands and Germany, and these tribes migrated to the Pyrenees region where they are now. I don't know if there was much else recorded, such as words or names, by the Roman writers reporting on them. I've only seen this in documentaries and articles about the Basque people's history; I'm not an expert. But as late as the Roman period, likely there were a few languages or dialects related to what would become modern Basque. Etruscan was also still alive as a language in the Roman period, early, and the modern name Tuscany (Toscana) derives from it. Also unknown are he Minoan language, and so we have some idea that there were other languages prior to the Indo-Europeans moving into the whole continent in prehistory, displacing or merging with the prior languages.
Finnish is kinda weird. They love letters ä, ö, y, j. In some cases it is close to Russian(my native language) and have in common with english (We don't have in russian english constructions like I am, you are. But finnish has)
наркоман штоле
finnish has rather strict grammatical patterns, «weird» letters are a normal thing, and finnish has by far the best phonology in the wolrd (in my opinion).
And copula is normal across the world and used to be used in russian before it became such shite.
@@amirsur1596 i don't claim that finnish is weird for everyone. It is weird for me. And about letters ö, j, y, ä. I know, that theese are pretty normal letters, but their pronounciation is quite interesting, especially if you aren't familiar with the language
I love how they say hi which hey
Best thing about Finnish, in my opinion, is inflection of prepositions in person.
Kanssa = with
Kanssani = with me
Kanssasi = with you
etc.
@@amirsur1596 To me, Italian, Finnish sounds like popping corn. Finnish and Italian share a fixed simple rules spelling. I once read that dyslexic people have an easier life if they have to deal with written Finnish or Italian than, say, English
Good stuff! Keep up the great work, language needs gotta stick together!
In the basque example for ergativity the first sentence actually would be
"Txakurrak hezurra ikusi du"
Otherwise the phrase is actually like
"The dogs has seen bone"
But overall pretty good job, your videos are cool 👍
Another banger by lingolizard
I think it’s odd to deem a language “not weird” just because it’s widely spoken.
I would say Irish. I’m learning the language and I was surprised by how similar it was to Latin in terms of how you use grammar. For example it follows the pattern of some Romance languages by using different forms if the same word to express who is doing it. If I were to say I eat it would be ithim, but if I were to say we eat it would be ithimid. I thought only Romance languages had this feature until I started to study Irish, which is a Celtic language. There are also some words that are similar too. I wonder if it was always like that or if something happened that changed it. It is very interesting to see how these languages develop.
That feature is super common in languages. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of languages on Earth are inflecting languages.
high quality subtitles here. bravo !
I was waiting the entire video for Pirahã, and literally yelled out loud like an idiot when it made it in lol
Fun fact! Until 2015 it was not only legal, but also mandatory, to kill a Basque person in Iceland :)
It was an article of the constitution written in 1615, after the shipwreck of several Basque whale hunters caused havoc on the island. The article stayed unnoticed on the constitution, until it was quietly revoked in 2015.
The idea that Pirahã is a highly empirical language that can’t conceptualize abstractions is a bit of a misunderstanding.
btw you should add 1-3 hashtags (#) in the description, UA-cam algorithm loves them
lol he actually did it
Every time I hear someone speak a Khoisan language, to me it sounds like someone is playing ping pong in the background.
Wow! I actually thought that this video is at least have 100.000 views. Damn, as a linguist-student this video is incredibly neat!
This is a very underrated channel
Köszönöm! Do those who speak Pirahã have a belief system?
3:52 Chilean here, that's the ghetto variety of our dialect, it is what African American Vernacular is to General American
Wait so zenekar means you brought in Basque? It means orchestra in Hungarian.
The only similar and identical word was balea-bálna.
Guess it's originated from basque then unless...
@@gabork5055 many languages use this word. It could've entered Romance languages from Basque though and from there to Hungarian. Basques have the most notable whaling culture in Europe
Zenekarren means you brought.
Dakarzu - you bring
Zenekarren - you brought
Bazenekar - If you brought
Zenekarke - You would bring
Then you have the plural version if tho Direct Object is plural:
Dakartzazu
Zenekartzan
Bazenekartza
Zenekartzake
Greetings from Euskal Herria (Basque Country)
The lack of abstraction thing is a bit hard to accept. I suspect the investigator is missing something that will turn out to be obvious. Some west African languages were thought to have no way to express past and future actions, in other words, no verb tenses (or particles or auxiliaries). The "poor, primitive, savages had no concept of time!". Then it was realized that they were using tones to express verb tense. It just didn't occur to European investigators to think in terms of tone.
It should also be considered that the words we use for abstractions arise from concrete things. For instance, exactly what are we "standing under" when we comprehend an idea? Oh, and comprehend comes from Latin: to take in hand. My bet is the Piraha are having a bit of fun at the investigators expense. If I remember correctly, it was originally claimed Piraha was not recursive, but this claim seems to have disappeared.
Absolutely. We wouldn’t be able to define abstractions if we didn’t first have things in the material to compare them to.
Even the word “abstraction” itself comes from “ab-“ and “trahere”, together “to draw off from”.
these discussions always involve european languages, but i think that might be because you need to be intimately fluent with a language to be sure about some phonemes. i’m sure that the scandinavian sj/hj is found somewhere else in the world, for example. one of my favorite topics is ejectives, one of the four airstream mechanisms in human languages. there are only a few places in the world where ejectives are present without being part of a larger sprachbund, like itelmen in the far east of russia, the oceanic (great-uncle languages to the polynesian languages) yapese, a very few chadic languages (distantly related to semitic and cushitic) in nigeria, the siouan languages on the great plains, and a few obscure papuan languages. it’s very interesting to me that these languages have gained an additional consonant class despite being surrounded by neighbors that don’t have it
6:46 this is probably because the Sentinelese don't have writing. Languages without a written form or tradition tend to develop faster because there are no records upon which to base a "correct" form of the language
Basque speaker here happy to here about it !
There is a small mistake in your example of ergative and a long explanation for it, in case anyone is curious:
The word for dog "txakur" turns into "txakurrak" if it's sing. and subject of the transitive verb, like in the example. "-a" is for sing. and not subj. of a transitive (but specified). Then there's "-ak" (again) and "-ek" for the plural cases (like "the dogs").
(Btw, know that this construction is slightly different in certain dialects of Basque, all this is the standard one)
The "r" at the end becomes double to represent the trill sound becoming longer as it normally happens when there is another vowel after it.
I'm no linguist but I hope I explained with enough precision 😅
As an Indonesian, for me, Tagalog is one of the weirdest language. They sound like someone speaking gibberish Indonesian, with some similar words but completely different grammar
Ive been to La Gomera and the whistle is real, it’s so funny to hear, I love it.
Saying it’s understood by all the locals is false tho. Many people who live on the island on a daily basis, do not speak it anymore. It’s only the old ones in the small villages, but in the capital it’s not understood.
Many thanks for this great and highly interesting video 👍🏻😊
I’m a little saddened that you didn’t mention Georgian. I like the way that you refer to linguistic differences in languages, as it perpetuates an ideology that I think all people should at least take into consideration. Thank you for the video!
yes, Georgian. Consonant clusters. Screeves. And so on. Surely should be in there.
@@chrisamies2141 the many kinds of verbs too, and the kh' sound.
@@alexanderbolton In German what sound is at the end of words "ich", "natürlich"? May be, the same?
And do you mean the sound of georgian letter "Ⴞ" "ხ" or another one?
@@chrisamies2141 Consonant clusters exist in european languages too. For example, the word "strengths" begins from three consonants.
@@user-bi4eo3ys1f Yes, but most languages don’t have an 8 phoneme consonant cluster like Georgian has, hahahaha! Gvprtsgvni is an actual phonological construction in Georgian, if I recall correctly, hahahaha
A lot of people in Europe might think that Finno-Ugric languages are strange, but in reality, Germanic languages have features that are far stranger than a language like Finnish, which is possibly one of the most logical, regular and refined languages that exists. Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, and Romance languages (as well as the rest of the IE family, frankly), on the other hand, are full of practically nothing but exceptions to their own rules, have horribly difficult phonologies, bat-shit orthographies in the case of English, Irish, French, and Danish, and in the case of the Romance languages, an unbearable verb conjugation system. Yet Spanish is proclaimed to be so easy while Finnish is said to be 'ungodly difficult', when Finnish counts not more than 10 irregular verbs. It's all about perspective.
Finnish's noun cases though...
Exactly. So many people (especially native English speakers) judge the difficulty of a language chiefly by the number of cases (or suffixes in general), and of course they freak out when they hear Finnish has 15 cases and a Finnish verb can have like 100+ different conjugation forms. But what they don't see is that the noun cases work essentially the same as English prepositions and that with the verbs, it's simply about putting a suffix/clitic, two, or three (in rare cases more) right next to each other, rather than using an auxiliary verb like "will", "have", or "do", plus the verb conjugation system is very regular. Even though it's complex, it's FAR more consistent, logical, and predictable than for example English pronunciation, word stress, prepositions, or the cursed phrasal verbs.
"most logical language"
t. >40 noun declensions
also vowel harmony is goofy and phonemic vowel length distinctions are hard
Agglutinative languages are fun, not gonna deny that, but not exactly good languages to learn for those who didn't grow up speaking one. Working on my own agglutinative conlang, which has a bit of Finnish influence.
@@smergthedargon8974 High inflectionality doesn't exclude logicality of grammar. The inflections may be high in number, but they're very regular, firmly systematic, and predictable, hence I see them as logical. Also, vowel harmony to me is the easiest and maybe the most systematic grammatical aspect of Finnish, iirc there are only a total of like 5 words where it doesn't apply. Could you perhaps elaborate on that "goofiness"?
Best of luck with your conlang, by the way, coincidentally I've also started creating one (though it's been laying idle for years now and it needs a thorough reworking) that is also meant to be inspired by Finnish, along with Irish, Hungarian, and Albanian and probably I'll also make it agglutinative in nature once I rework it. Either agglutinative or agglutinative-fusional.
@@miaow8670 Oh, I was just mentioning vowel harmony because I thought it was a silly feature, not necessarily a hard one. Phoenemic vowel length is much harder than what is effectively formalized mispronunciations that make speaking the language _easier,_ though it does mean many things have two different forms, which can be confusing.
Here's an example of Kazhranek, the conlang I'm working on:
Ktachaarishish ded zezedset tchiisehsd desh Shashanaararrin.
"I shall cast you and all you have ever loved into the fires of hell", literally "[I will soon throw/cast] [you] [and all] [ever been loved] [by/due to you] [into the fire of fires]."
The "hs" in "tchiisehsd" is a neat sound I'm not sure what to call - I _think_ it might be a post-palatal/pre-velar lateral fricative.
Pretty underrated channel you got
Adding a bit on the weirdness of Spanish, Mexican Spanish doesn't differentiate between s, c or z, the sounds for all those are "s" (c still does the "k" sound)
I’ll be honest, German pronunciation is actually easier that English (as a native English speaker who’s learning German), the only weird thing is sometimes the “ch” which can be very aggressive sounding, but EVERY VOWEL IS THE SAME PRONUNCIATION IT’S SO EASY TO LEARN
Same for Northern English people, not Southern, sadly 😢.
"But every vowel is the same pronunciation", AHAHAHAH😂
@@alienordic3143 that does not mean what you think it does lmaoooo
E always is like an uh
A is always ah
I is always Ih (like the I in ‘in’)
O is always ouh
U is always oo
It only changes with 2 vowels next to each other but even then the 2 vowel sounds also won’t change
how exactly can one sound be aggressive sounding? 😂 also many languages have this sound, maybe learning a language will be easier for you if you throw your 1940s stereotypes out of the window
@@caroskaffee3052 well, people SAY it’s aggressive sounding but that’s because the only German they ever heard is Hitler
Weird languages you say *mentions Hyperpirate
Who else checked if the upload date was April 1st when hearing about Icelandic basque?
My ancestors have spoken Breton, Basque, Pasiego (from a remote Spanish Berber comunity), Ladino and Spanish Caribean Pidgin. All endangered languages with few speakers. And I speak French and Spanish which are two of the main languages of this planet, both growing, that can be understood by something like 1 Billion people if you add the two. Probably a natural evolution (selection) of languages due to social interractions in our modern world ?
2:00 so is the Kartvelian connection of Basque still just a fringe theory ...I'm not a linguist I just read something about that
Yeah basically, as far as I know the only evidence they have is ergativity and like maybe 2-6 vaguely similar words.
Many big languages put inanimate objects into male and female categories which is super weird when you think about it.
And as a native Finnish speaker I also think that having separate pronouns for male and female in third person singular is kinda unnecessary. I mean you don’t have them for second person singular for example*
We’ve only got ”hän” for third person singular. It can refer to any person and doesn’t tell anything about their gender. No, this is not something someone came up with eight years ago for equality, it’s the only third person singular pronoun our language has ever had. Estonian and Turkish have the same feature. If we want to tell the gender we simply say ”mies/nainen=man/woman”.
*By the way, I remember a tiny bit of Thai and they have something like this for first person singular. ”Thank you” is eihter ”kapunkap” or ”kapunkaa” depending on the gender of the speaker. The spelling is for sure wrong, that’s just how I phonetically remember them.
I got one.. Maybe not as weird, but it's only spoken by maybe 100-150.000 people. Vendelbomål. Its from a region of Denmark called Vendsyssel. The region tried to declare itself an independent state/nation some years ago, but they never succeeded. The language is just a regional dialect of Danish, but it has some interesting changes that makes it difficult for many Danes to understand it 100%
Piraha is underresearched, it is difficult to say anything conclusive about it. My gut as a linguist, though, tells me that there can't be a language without abstractions. It's a quality of the human mind.
It is also possible that the language can express the abstractions figuratively only, e.g. "the snake took my papaya, which really hurt my toe." Though I suspect there are many concepts which don't readily manifest through concrete metaphors. This may be because many of them are invented, which suggests furthermore that an isolated preoccupied society may simply never invent those concepts, and as a result the language won't cover them.
Part 2 ?
There's also Algonquian-Basque and Belle Isle pidgin, which had pretty much the same circumstances as Basque-Icelandic pidgin except they use terms from Basque and Breton, respectively, and an indigenous American language.
I have actually heard of Basque-Icelandic pidgin for 2nd time, you are the second time. Guess I am too weird.....
I excepting a short video showing me weird languages:
*Me getting the full theory of weirdness*
Here's a weird thing: right at the end when the screen is filled with these greenish words, my eyes landed straight on two which are so close to me- the Portuguese "obrigado" and the Serbocroat "hvala" (then I saw that all the words were "thank you" in many languages). That was so weird: seeing both these at once (Portuguese with the left eye, Serbocroat with the right?) I loved this video! Part of my childhood was in Africa and so I had delightful exposure to Xhosa. Mmm, clicky!
How do we measure weirdness? The term itself is somewhat subjective, but if we wanted to come up with a more objective measure, we can look at which languages contain grammatical or pronunciation features that are less common among all languages (or among languages per capita) and then analyze which have the most of these uncommon features. In the end you will end up with the languages that are most different structurally from the other languages, hence evoking a sense of weirdness among people of other languages.
In basque the dog has seen the bone would be "txakurrAk hezurrA ikusi du", the a at the end of words/before the ergative mark is the article, like 'the' in english.
Me getting a Basque song recommendation in my Spotify discover weekly: ok guess this is my new favourite song (Biok - Zuzenean by Bulego if you're wondering)
Icelandic is weird because, due to its geographical position, it got less changes compare to other germanic (and even non) languages
How have you not heard people call German weird? Half the time people mention the language it’s something about it having long words and always sounding angry.
not sure, these are all just outdated stereotypes anyway
Nice video!
You could say some languages would leave you "speechless."
even if what the weirdest language depends on who you ask, english is absolutely weird compared to other germanic languages.
english isnt a language, its a frankenstein abomination of languages but everything is horribly malformed, and it also beats the hell out of other languages and then robs them of random vocabulary and grammar.
you need to stop making the best goddamn videos on YT
I’m sorry I’ll stop
…not >:D
That goes for the both of you, damn
Grammarian Whistle. Please we need a full video about it.
I really enjoyed the way you think "weirdness", it was amazing! As a French I am still confused and fascinated by the French language and currently learning different languages I like a lot "weird languages" !
As a person who is mostly Basque, I appreciate the acknowledgment of the language. It’s history is wild.
Bai zera, euskera benetan bitxia da. Agurrak 👋👋
Chilean Spanish is so weird the map has its own category just for it 3:47
Could you do a video on Greenlandic/Inuktitut?
English I would think be strange to most... you got letters that are silent, letters that are not pronounced how they would appear... There is a local town called "Flaherty" but EVERYONE pronounces it "Flair-ety" and it somehow has a R in the pronunciation that isn't written. Heck even the rule I before E, except after the letter C isn't always the case.
Im basque, i think my language is beautiful
Okay that shocked me
Basque has more (in fact more than double) speakers than Icelandic
Like it makes sense from a population density pov, however, Icelandic feels so much less foreign to me. (I mean English is West Germanic, Icelandic is North Germanic)
Iceland is just very, very sparsely populated. And Basque is not even the most spoken non-spanish language in Spain.
@@alfrredd it's the 3th, but it's bacause it was discriminated for centuries and is the only Iberian language that doesn't come from Latin. So it's a bullied language, gixajo euskera :( ❤
Esperot euskera milaka urte gehiau eotea geure arten ❤❤
Wow! You were 30 subscribers like... 30 subscribers, one of your first subscribers here, I'm very surprised!
Georgian loves consonants to a weird extreme. They do have vowels but they string several consonants together without any vowel separation. Hawaiian does the opposite, string several vowels together without any consonant separation.