The Strangest Language

[Angleter]

Georgian, seriously so many consonant clusters, how the hell are you ever supposed to normally pronounce žblnknutie?

Most Georgians will be baffled too, especially since you apparently expect them to be speaking Slovak...

Maybe there's a Slovak diaspora in Georgia, USA.

[Maltropia]

Most Georgians will be baffled too, especially since you apparently expect them to be speaking Slovak...

Maybe there's a Slovak diaspora in Georgia, USA.

That would have been an epic save, if only Jala had said it.

[Tehraan]

Dutch spelling is horrendous. It's a mess of pointless rules and pointless vowels and pointless writing.
ex: ij and ei + au and ou

no differences in pronunciation and rules when to use one and the other them.

[Syvorji]

Sinhala, because Sri Lanka made a one language law in 1956, which angered many Tamils, hence why Sinhala is the strangest language.

However, when it comes to the writing, it is Hawaiian because it's alphabet is confusing to those who do not learn Hawaii.

[Anogen Dys]

English? Gah. Just wait until you hear the abomination of a conlang that is Ithkuli.

[Andorianus]

Chinese. I mean, there are 9 different types of Chinese? Wtf?

And Russian is pretty weird too, they try to imitate the Roman Alphabet but fail epicly in doing so.

[The Archregimancy]

Most Georgians will be baffled too, especially since you apparently expect them to be speaking Slovak...

Maybe there's a Slovak diaspora in Georgia, USA.

In any case, Georgian's fairly lightweight when it comes to consonant clusters in the Caucasus.

Now Ubykh... that's a proper consonant cluster language. Ubykh has (or rather, had - the last native speaker died in the early 1990s) 84 different consonants - easily a record - and only two vowels. It's essentially impossible to write in the Latin Alphabet, though here's an attempt to try:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ubykh.htm

[Bitchkitten]

I'm disappointed. So far, I regret to say, most the choices in this thread (at least when I started writing this post) have been fairly uninspired - largely restricted to mainstream European and Asian languages; though I'll give Angleter mod cookies for Manchu (Islamic Hazarastan only gets half a mod cookie, for failing to recognise that there are at least nine distinct living Sami languages, even if only two of them have over 1000 speakers, and only one has over 10,000 speakers).

But one of the strangest languages has to be Hixkaryana. Spoken by some 500 indigenous Brazilians deep in the Amazon rainforest, it was the first Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) language ever described. In other words, where English speakers say "the jaguar ate the man", Hixkaryana has to take the word order "the man ate the jaguar" (or rather "toto yonoye kamara" - male person eat [past tense] jaguar); but with the same meaning as in English.

OVS is the rarest of possible sentence word orders. There are other languages which occasionally permit OVS (though even highly inflected languages with complex case systems that can hypothetically permit any word order often prefer a more common specific order - see Russian), but the number which require OVS is vanishingly small, limited to three or four indigenous languages of the Americas, none of which have over 5000 speakers.

Being from Texas, the only foreign language I hear regularly is Spanish, which seems more reasonable to me than English. And I don't know if you're European, But remember that Europeans, and many other people, have more access to foreign language speakers than most Americans do.

Think about this- when you enter Orange, Texas, there is a sign that says "El Paso, Texas, 893 miles." How many countries would most Europeans have driven across in 893 miles>

[Angleter]

Maybe there's a Slovak diaspora in Georgia, USA.

In any case, Georgian's fairly lightweight when it comes to consonant clusters in the Caucasus.

Now Ubykh... that's a proper consonant cluster language. Ubykh has (or rather, had - the last native speaker died in the early 1990s) 84 different consonants - easily a record - and only two vowels. It's essentially impossible to write in the Latin Alphabet, though here's an attempt to try:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ubykh.htm

Which was the one with the 60-odd cases?

[Anogen Dys]

Chinese. I mean, there are 9 different types of Chinese? Wtf

If you're talking about Mandarin/cantonese/etc. , then bare in my mind that they are essentially separate languages.

[The Araucania]

in europe the strangest mainstream language is finnish

[The Archregimancy]

In any case, Georgian's fairly lightweight when it comes to consonant clusters in the Caucasus.

Now Ubykh... that's a proper consonant cluster language. Ubykh has (or rather, had - the last native speaker died in the early 1990s) 84 different consonants - easily a record - and only two vowels. It's essentially impossible to write in the Latin Alphabet, though here's an attempt to try:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ubykh.htm

Which was the one with the 60-odd cases?

Tsez!

Or as I wrote the last time this came up...

Hungarian is actually the hardest or one of the hardest for English speakers to learn.
http://www.wisegeek.com/which-are-the-m ... -learn.htm

35 cases. Yeah.

This isn't strictly speaking true; my mother in law - who grew up in Budapest and used to be a professional interpreter for the Warsaw Pact (don't ask, and I won't have to kill you) - speaks fluent Hungarian, and tells me that there are a mere 18 noun cases in Hungarian (though no genitive! The dative is used for the genitive). I don't know where wisegeek managed to get 35 cases from.

Certainly Hungarian is a difficult language for English speakers to learn (let's not even get started on verb forms) for the simple reason that it's not an Indo-European language, but it's not necessarily intrinsically harder than any other non-Indo-European language - the Chinese language Kam, spoken by about 1.5 million Dong in southern China, has 15 tones depending on whether a syllable is open (9 tones) or checked (6 tones). It must be a nightmare of a language for the tone deaf.

The real winner in the noun case war, for what it's worth, would appear to be the Northeast Caucasian (and thus non-Indo-European) language Tsez, spoken by 15,000 people in the Caucasus Mountains, which has 8 recognised syntatical cases, and 56 different locative cases, giving us 64 cases. There are three more disputed syntatical cases.

The recognised syntactical cases are: Absolutive; Ergative; Genitive 1; Genitive 2; Dative; Instrumental; Equative 1; Equative 2

The disputed syntactical cases are: possessive 1, possessive 2; abessive.

The locative system is so fiendishly difficult that I won't even begin to try to fully outline it here (code for "I admit I don't really understand it fully myself"), but there appear to be four base settings (Essive; Lative; Ablative; Allative) further modified by location, direction, and orientation, and whether the described noun is close or far. I think - I could well be wrong.

On top of that, Tsez doesn't restrict itself to masculine, feminine, and neuter - oh no... It has four noun classes consisting of: masculine; feminine and inanimate objects; animals and inanimate objects, and inanimate objects only - but like French, it's not immediately obvious from the noun ending which class inanimate objects should be classified as. Each of these four classes takes a different ending in the 64 cases.

The languages of the Caucasus are full of what an English speaker would consider to be linguistic superlatives. Ubykh, for example, had 84 consonants and only two vowels; a shame, then, that its last native speaker died in 1992.

Now if only we could combine the case system of Tsez with the consonants of Ubykh.

[Sun Aut Ex]

To be fair, that 80 consonant language contains a lot of letters that basically sound the same.

in europe the strangest mainstream language is finnish

On the contrary, I find a lot about Finnish to be very logical. Their alphabet and spelling, for one. Although admittedly, the language itself is apparently quite complex.

One of my favourite bands is Finnish; they recently released a new album and all the lyrics are in Finnish. The lead singer, who doubles as main songwriter, was apparently quite proud to have managed to do that, as he has an easier time writing lyrics in English than in his own native language.

[Angleter]

Chinese. I mean, there are 9 different types of Chinese? Wtf?

For all intents and purposes, they are different languages- Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Jin, Xiang, Gan, Min, and Hakka (that's eight, although Ping and Hui are sometimes considered separate)- and within even Min and Mandarin, the dialectical differences aren't all that mutually intelligible (and even though Danish and Bokmal Norwegian are mutually intelligible, they're usually considered different languages). Much as with Arabic, it's the political situation (and tradition and writing system) which is keeping the Sinitic languages considered as one.

[Xarithis]

But one of the strangest languages has to be Hixkaryana. Spoken by some 500 indigenous Brazilians deep in the Amazon rainforest, it was the first Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) language ever described. In other words, where English speakers say "the jaguar ate the man", Hixkaryana has to take the word order "the man ate the jaguar" (or rather "toto yonoye kamara" - male person eat [past tense] jaguar); but with the same meaning as in English.

OVS is the rarest of possible sentence word orders. There are other languages which occasionally permit OVS (though even highly inflected languages with complex case systems that can hypothetically permit any word order often prefer a more common specific order - see Russian), but the number which require OVS is vanishingly small, limited to three or four indigenous languages of the Americas, none of which have over 5000 speakers.

I feel the need to know more. Very interesting.

[NewHyperborea (Ancient)]

Српски је онако ,није баш да је чудан али ако га не 3наш тешко се снађеш

[Feral Land]

Strangest languages - Suomi (Finnish), Sami (Laplander), Euskara (Basque), and English

[The Archregimancy]

To be fair, that 80 consonant language contains a lot of letters that basically sound the same.

Only if you're not Ubykh.

Linguists classify 29 distinct fricative phonemes, 27 sibilants, and 20 uvular consonants.

There's a good Wiki article on Ubykh phonology that explains the distinctions more clearly than I ever could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_phonology

[Glorious Freedonia]

San. It is also probably our original language.

[Meryuma]

English? Gah. Just wait until you hear the abomination of a conlang that is Ithkuli.

Abomination? Ithkuil is awesome. I haven't learned it, I decided to start with Ilaksh since it's more manageable.

Anyways, weirdest natlangs are Pirahã, the Salishan languages, Ubykh, Navajo and Basque. PIE is pretty odd. "h₂owis h₁ekwos-kʷe", anyone?

Weirdest conlangs are probably this one verbless language Kēlen, the entirely written language X, Ithkuil and Ilaksh, and probably Klingon.

Chinese. I mean, there are 9 different types of Chinese? Wtf?

And Russian is pretty weird too, they try to imitate the Roman Alphabet but fail epicly in doing so.

There aren't "different types of Chinese", there are different languages in the Chinese language family. Also, Russian isn't "trying to imitate" anything. Cyrillic developed in the Balkans out of the Greek alphabet and over time the letters evolved to resemble Roman ones.

San. It is also probably our original language.

If it is, the clicks definitely aren't. If they were primordial, they'd probably be a lot more common instead of being nearly exclusive to Africa.

[Angleter]

Српски је онако ,није баш да је чудан али ако га не 3наш тешко се снађеш

That's Serbian. If I can identify it, then it's not strange enough. I wouldn't be able to recognise Tsez or Navajo or ǂHoan, now would I?

[Staenwald]

Georgian, seriously so many consonant clusters, how the hell are you ever supposed to normally pronounce žblnknutie?

hebrew has no vowels at all...

[Svertet-Jord]

Sami. I do love it, though. This is why:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxXzcF4zMvk&feature=related

Ahaha I am a Sami, and yes our language is pretty different than any others really. I think that Chinese (any kind) is the weirdest because it's like many different sounds spoken strangely.

[Astralsideria]

Српски је онако ,није баш да је чудан али ако га не 3наш тешко се cнађеш

Very nice, I'm sure. So what exactly does "Srpski ye onako, niye basch da ye chudan ali ako ga ne znasch teschko se snadjesch" mean? And shouldn't that "3" be a "з", or is it a proper noun?

EDIT: error in transliteration. I feel stupid. EDIT2: and just to confound the feeling...

[Harata]

I'd have to say Spanish because I had to study it for 3 years in high school and hated every minute of it. That could have made me biased, I suppose