World's Stangest Languages

French...

Another example of a polysynthetic structure I remember from university years (it is from Inuit/Eskimo):

Qasuiirsarvigsarssingitluinarnarpuk (meaning: "Somebody did not find a suitable resting place")

It is to be taken as one syntactic unit, something of a verb that has "eaten up" both its object and subject, the two are incorporated in it. I guess an illustration how it would sound in English would be: "Goodrestinplaceonefoundnot" (the order of the English words is optional, I don't remember which morpheme meant which, and it is to be taken as a verb in negative). This structure is the strangest I can think of.

Speaking of "click" languages, as I know, some Caucasian languages also have such sounds. I think the Caucasus is the strangest area linguistically, there are several hundred languages spoken there on an area which is not larger than Sweden, and it happens that people from two neighbouring villages can hardly understand each other due to the difference in their languages (as in Dagestan, for example).

Thanks to all of you who have responded with your views so far.

Damian: One of my sisters is a Sinophile and was even into some of the Chairman Mao stuff in the early 1970's. However, even she still thinks Chinese is "weird". We get into arguments all the time over whether China's capital should be called Peking (which I prefer) or Beijing (which she adamantly insists on).

Ed: In your case, maybe I should have asked you what you think the most "exotic" languages in the world are rather than the "strangest".
Bergen: I can see where French might be a candidate. Some linguists claim that even though it looks like a neo-Latin language in written form, in spoken form it sounds more like Eskimo with even some of the same holophrasticism (polysynthesism)that you find in Eskimo and many Native American languages. It also has more influences from northern European languages (Celtic & Germanic) than any of the other Romance languages.

James & Canadian Adam: It's good that you mentioned the click languages of the Bushmen (Hottentots; Khoi etc). Linguist now believe that click sounds were present in all early human languages but later disappeared everywhere except in Bushman and a few other languages of Africa.

Easterner: Good to hear from you as always. I like your example from Eskimo. The Canadian aboriginal language you were referring to is , I believe, Mohawk. Mohawk was originally spoken exclusively in New York State but most Mohawks fled to Canada during the American Revolution because they were British loyalists. Since then, many have returned to the eastern United States in search of jobs. I can also see why you mentioned the Caucasus with its numerous unique languages. In fact, the Arabs of the Middle Ages referred to the Caucasus region jabal al-alsun, "The Mountain of Tongues."

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Something I forgot to mention: my own language, Hungarian, is also found to be very strange by some people, so it may run with some chance at a competition for the strangest language in the world. One reason for this that it has a subject conjugation and an object conjugation (for transitive verbs only), and the use depends if the verb verb is related to a definite sentence object mentioned earlier, or is related to an indefinite object, or to no object at all. To take a simple example:

"Látok egy házat" = "I can see A house"
"Látom a házat" = "I can see THE house"
"Látok" = "I can see" (in general, as an ability)
"Látom" = "I (can) see IT" (something mentioned earlier)

The conjugation for all persons in the first case is: látok, látsz, lát, látunk, látok, látnak.

And in the second case: látom, látod, látja, látjuk, látjátok, látják.

I hope you understand what this is all about. At any rate, the commonest mistake for foreigners is to use the wrong structure in a particular utterance. I have met some of them who use it correctly, but usually they have been living in Hungary for decades, or have learnt the language for quite a long time.

To make matters more interesting, Hungarian also has a structure that can be called polysynthetic, in structures like "látlak" (I can see you) and, of course "szeretlek" (I love you). The "-lak/-lek" (the form used dapands on the type of vowel in the verb root) tells you both that it is I who love you and it is YOU who I love. The full form would be "szeretlek téged" (the latter is the object case of "you"), but if you say just the first word to somebody, they will know it refers to nobody else but her or him. :-)

It is "depends", sorry for the stupid typo...

Brennus:

Thanks for that information on Chinese.

I think some English people think that the native UK Celtic languages are "strange", and they seem to make a point of deliberately mispronouncing Celtic place names (especially Welsh ones, as these are closer to England than the Celtic placesnames in Scotland). I think this stems from the historic resentment the English feel towards the Celts who have resisted the onslaught of English and refused to completely relinquish their languages.

Brennus: <<We get into arguments all the time over whether China's capital should be called Peking (which I prefer) or Beijing (which she adamantly insists on).>>

As I know, the official Mandarin pronunciation is something like /pei-ching/. Beijing, on the other hand, is the official Pin-yin transcription. Therefore, although in most European languages they say Peking, I feel Beijing is somewhat closer to how it is actually pronounced (admitting that the sound values of letters in Pin-yin are much different from those in most western languages).

By the way, what I find the stangest in Chinese culture is that they speak at least five major languages (the differences are too big for them to be called "dialects"), and still consider themselves part of one nation (I am thinking of Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, etc., certainly not Tibetan or Uyghur or Hmong-Mien). Quite the same as in France, which, however seems to lag behind China in recognising its regional languages as such...

It is even more exact to represent the pronunciation of Beijing as /pey-tyin/, they don't pronounce the "g" at the end.

Actually, the mandarin chinese pronounciation of 'Beijing' is very close how it is spelled, something like 'bay-jing', just as pronounced in English. Pinyin is very phonetic, and usually represents a fair approximation of the actual pronunciation. You just have to be familiar with the sound values.

Just a side note, Mohawk is not at all considered to be an Inuit language. Mohawk indians are even genetically distinct from the inuit, having arrived in North America long before the Inuit.

We're used to Indo-European languages. Hungarian and Mohawk and those languages with clicking sounds, are not Indo-European.

Spanish is polysynthetic in some degree, especially with Imperative forms of verbs: "róbasela" (Steal it from him!), and in the classic (and ridiculous) "quiérote" (I want/love you), but nowadays it would be "Te quiero". Obviously, they're suffixes of direct or indirect pronouns, so it's not really polysynethetic.

Interesting. I have come across several threads on antimoon on people's thoughts about languages other than English. Chinese is always regarded as 'ugly' or 'weird'. I myself am Chinese. Teochew (sub dialect of ancient Hokkien spoken by 20 million Chinese around the world) is my mother tongue supposedly, but I'm more fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. Not I'm offended, however, it's not fair to say Chinese sounds loudly and annoying. Please don't generalise! The Chinese language you hear could be Mandarin, Cantonese or others, moreover, a bad accent can make a language lousy. Northern Mandarin accent sounds super annoying to my ears, cos their retroflex sound is way to extreme and their tone tend to be much more wavy compared to southern. Some regional Mandarin sound horrible as well, for instance southern Taiwanese, Guangdong people etc. I think standard mainland (CCTV accent) and Taipei Mandarin sound great as well as Singaporean Mandarin. I personally too think Cantonese is pleasant to hear as long as it's with a HK accent. Besides that, I just don't understand why French have problems with their standard French education policy (not sure what it practically is but have some guesses based on the posts I read). Schools in China are guided to speak mandarin in class altogether, but minor langauge speaking people never have something against it. Anyways, even obviously some are dying out soon like Shanghainese, yet we don't see a sign that its people are going to do something about it.

Easterner writes the English "has a spelling which usually gives no clue as to pronunciation," It's not really as bad as all that. In fact most of the words in English are spelt quite sensibly. Take Easterner's very sentence for example.

Also he writes "... it is a Germanic language which uses Latin words for the noblest or most sophisticated concepts." Is "good" not one of the most noble of all concepts?

OK, maybe I exaggerated a little. What I meant is that a string of letters in an English word does not lead to a conclusion that the same string in another word will be pronounced exactly the same way, as it is normal in most languages. There are examples we know all too well, like the various pronunciations of "-ough". English spelling does give a near-perfect clue as to how words used to be pronounced in the 15th century. On the other hand, I myself really have no problems with English spelling, actually I never ever had. A Martian who would like to pronounce words by inferring pronunciation from spelling alone quite possibly would ;-).

As for "noble concepts": "good" is one one counter-example, "truth" is another, but how about "noble" itself, plus "purity", "clarity", "courage", "dignity", "spirit", "sanity", "respectable", "gentle" or whatever else may be perceived as "noble"? A synonym of courage is "guts", but that does carry a different connotation, doesn't it? I don't want to carry this too far though. There are maybe languages stranger than English, but very few that exhibit these qualities together.