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Armenian In The Top Ten Of World's Weirdest Languages

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  • Armenian In The Top Ten Of World's Weirdest Languages

    ARMENIAN IN THE TOP TEN OF WORLD'S WEIRDEST LANGUAGES

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

    http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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