5 Of The Weirdest Languages In The World | Random Thursday

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From sounds that literally damage your vocal cords to a language that's entirely whistled, these are 5 of the strangest, quirkiest languages in the world.

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The Piraha Language - Brazil

This one is controversial because the theory is the language doesn't have recursion. Recursion is a linguistic property where you can add phrases into phrases, also called Nesting.

This is controversial because Noam Chomsky popularized the idea that recursions are a part of what he called “universal grammar” that you find in all languages.

And then Dr. Dan Everett studied the Piraha people of the Amazon rain forest in the 1970, first as a missionary and later just to research their language.

And in a paper in 2005, he claimed that the Piraha people do not use recursion, flying in the face of linguistic doctrine and shaking the very foundations of our knowledge to the ground, making international news.

Aymara Language - Andes, South America

The Aymara language isn’t a small, tucked away language in some
The reason it’s on this list is due to a little quirk that seems to be unique to the Aymara, which is the way they refer to the past and the future.

Why would they do that? The answer is a simple flip in perception, by saying that events from the past are known, meaning we can see them, they’re in front of us. Whereas the future is unknown, we can’t see it… So it’s behind us.

!Xóõ: Botswana

It’s no secret that there are languages in sub-Saharan Africa that use click sounds along with other consonant sounds, there are several of these but this one is the quintessential one.

It features 5 different click sounds and 17 accompanying ones. Also 4 vowel sounds with four varying tones.

This language is not just difficult to learn, it’s physically straining on a non-speaker because some of these clicks are next to impossible to do without a serious amount of training.



Guugu Yimithirr: Aboriginal Language, Australia

Guugu Yimithirr is an ancient language, spoken by the aboriginal people of Australia for thousands of years, specifically the Guugu Yimithirr people of Far North Queensland, in fact it was actually the first aboriginal language ever written down by James Cook in 1770 and is where the word Kangaroo comes from.

All their directions used cardinal directions. Cardinal directions being North, South, East, West, and the directions in between. They didn’t have words for left, right, front or back.

What this means is that every speaker must always know what geographic direction they are facing at all times. It’s like the language has layered the geographic directions into the fabric of their culture. You literally can’t convey information without it.

Silbo Gomero: Spain

La Gomera is an island, specifically the smallest of the Spanish Canary Islands just northwest of Africa. And on that tiny island is a language that’s not spoken anywhere else called Silbo Gomero, and it holds the top spot on this list for one simple reason. It’s spoken with whistles.

It’s literally like a whistled version of Spanish featuring two whistled vowels and four consonants.
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When I was a lad, every Dad in the street has their own distinctive whistle they would use to summon their kids at meal times.

rayperkins
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Hello! Linguistics graduate here! My favourite is the Oksapmin communities in Papua New Guinea - they have a counting system up to 27 that uses body part names instead of traditional number words. This means that they start counting on their fingers on one hand, and keep going counting designated spots on their forearm, shoulder and head, before going over to the other side of the body in reverse, down to the fingers again, which works out at 27. So if you wanted to say that you had 12 of something, you'd say the Oskapmin word for your first ear, but if you wanted to say you had 20 of something, you'd say the word for your second elbow :) Amazing! Apparently it's dying out nowadays as a cash economy takes over. (Source: Saxe & Esmonde, 2004.)

ReasonsToSmilee
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I’m from central Australia and grew up alongside aboriginal people. Few things noted in local Arentre and Walpri language is they don’t have a word for fast or slow (that I know of ). Another thing is song lines. Songs Lines are ancient songs past down through generations that guide people on tracks/routes across the country to water holes and hunting grounds mainly. But there is one song line that goes from Alice Springs all the way to Byron Bay in NSW. Which is literally half way across the continent.

desertratnt-
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In the Caucasus Mountains there is a language called Archi. It has 26 vowels, 82 consonants and 1.5 million possible verb conjugations

ZiZla
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me: * whistles the tune of a song *
guy who speaks silbo gomero: * horrified face *

adamsweakaf
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In Mexico we currently speak 68 languages, officially. Not dialects, but actual languages. In my region Mayan is the second most spoken language, after Spanish. Actually our Spanish is mixed with Mayan. But the point is that there is a language where there are no “objects”. Everything is referred to as a person. From the person you could be talking to, to the rock laying by your foot. There is another one where they have 25 different verbs for “carrying”. For example, with one hand, with both of them, in your back, over your head and so on. I can’t remember the actual names, but I think one of them is Serí. I couldn’t find the article where I read it a long time ago, but in a country with so many languages, I’m sure there are countless more interesting fun facts.
Greetings

gerardorios
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I wonder if aboriginals ever roll their eyes and say "no, your OTHER west"

paulpavich
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I remember listening to an episode of RadioLab that mentioned the aboriginal speech patterns. One of the researchers worked to learn the language and one day, for a moment, he said he had like a GPS in his head. He pictured the terrain of the surrounding area from above, which he knew well by that time, and he knew his position and directional orientation within the space. When he mentioned this to a member of the tribe, they responded with something like, "Yes. We all have that."

WFGRex
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"isn't tech amazing, we have satellites in space that tell us where we are at all times"
Aboriginals: we do that shit in our heads.

ec
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In Chinese, the past is above and the future is below, as if we were falling through time.

davidcrandall
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Watching this as a linguistics major and we've literally used 4 of these as examples to explain how language can influence perspective. Super interesting stuff.

nienkepalm
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It tickles me that Tolkien basically invented Middle Earth to have a place to put the languages he made up.

sitara
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One cool thing about linguistics is that every language changes how you perceive the world and what you prioritize. Some languages just have no concept of time and just live in the moment and I think some languages obsession with "time" and "future" causes so much stress.

Would be interesting to see some research linking depression and happiness to the language a person grew up with.

cocogoat
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Without recursion, my mother couldn’t speak. She doesn’t finish sentences, she just keeps adding subordinate clauses on top of each other.

noelleggett
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Today's episode is brought to you by the letters B, P, Fuh, and the numbers many and few.

amckeown
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I lived in China for six years and studied Mandarin Chinese. What I loved most about it, was how their words describe what the noun is. For example, the word for movie literally means electric shadow. The word for telephone literally means electric speech. Computer is electric brain. Escalator is electric stairs. They do this not just for devices that use electricity. They do it for animals. For example, owl literally is cat head eagle. Hippopotamus is river cow. Kangaroo is pocket mouse. Panda is bear cat. Caterpillar is towel insect. Cities. Beijing means north capital. It’s the capital and it’s in the North. Nanjing means south capital. It’s the former capital and it is south of Beijing. Shanghai means on sea. It is on the sea, right next to it. Elementary school is little learn. University is big learn. They also do it with more abstract things. “Be careful” is little heart. Center is middle heart. I could go on and on and on...

larrydirtybird
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Is nobody talking about the fact that the guy said "Una botella de vino blanco" when he was actually holding up red wine?

jancovanderwesthuizen
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When he said "no recursion" i felt really stupid...

Baerock
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I can see how using "your west hand" could be superior to saying left or right. Facing another person, they say your west hand and it's also their west hand. It's logical.

bridgetsclama
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The Piraha describe color via comparison, not just light or dark. They say something is the color of the river/kind of leaf/rainy sky/specific animal fur/etc. So they don't have a word for blue, but they can communicate it by describing an object of similar color.

As hunter-gatherers color is important to them. Numbers are pretty much irrelevant to them though, so they never developed words for numbers. They're a *fascinating* people.

suzbone