Armenian In The Top Ten Of World’s Weirdest Languages

ARMENIAN IN THE TOP TEN OF WORLD’S WEIRDEST LANGUAGES

22:15 03.07.2013

Armenian has been included in the top ten of the world’s weirdest
languages.

Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken by 6,000 people, is the weirdest language
in the world. That’s what linguist Tyler Schnoebelen of Standford
University 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, the Foreign Policy
Magazine reports.

Using the World Atlas of Language Structures, Idibon coded the
languages for 21 characteristics including, for example, how subjects,
objects, and verbs are ordered in a sentence, or how a language makes
clear that a sentence is a question.

When Schnoebelen ran the numbers, Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken in
Oaxaca, Mexico, was the least like the majority of the world’s other
languages. And it is pretty unusual: Schnoebelen describes it as a
“verb-initial tonal language” that has no mechanism for demonstrating
questions (so “You are alright.” and “Are you alright?” sound the
exact same).

It’s probably not surprising that some of the strangest languages
are some of the most obscure. The second weirdest is Nenets, spoken
in Siberia, followed by Choctaw, a Native American language from the
central plains.

But some of the weirdest languages are widely spoken. The
seventh-strangest language, Kongo, is spoken by half a million people
in Central Africa. After that comes Armenian, then German. English
ranks fairly high as well, coming in 33rd. There’s also no particular
region of strange languages – the top 25 weirdest – are scattered
across every continent.

Schnoebelen notes that while Germanic languages are all pretty weird,
Romance languages run the full breadth of the strangeness spectrum,
from Spanish, which falls in the Weirdness Index’s top 25, down to
Portuguese, which ranked as one of the most mundane languages.

Click here for the full ranking.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

http://www.armradio.am/en/2013/07/03/armenian-in-the-top-ten-of-worlds-weirdest-languages/
http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/

Emil Lazarian

“I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.” - WS