Directed Graph of Which Human Language Is Incomprehensible to Most People | Hacker News Reader

Directed Graph of Which Human Language Is Incomprehensible to Most People

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

34 pointstokenadult14 comments

Remember, this is not a directed graph reflecting language fluency or anything like that. It only shows what the most common figure of speech in that language is.

So English -> "It's Greek to me." Chinese -> 《跟天书一样》

Others here. http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php

"The suggestion that the Spanish-American word gringo comes from the expression “hablar en griego”"

False. We say "está en chino" (it's in chinese).

Also is the case for the spanish spoken in Spain, I'm used to ear: "está en chino" or "suena a chino" ("sounds like chinese").

The author of the post draws a lot of his examples from a page at Omniglot. The table there (link below) shows variation for a number of languages. Spanish in particular offers both Greek and Chinese as "incomprehensible" languages. Portuguese also offers Greek and Chinese. Slovenian has "Spanish village" and Chinese. (That odd phrase - "Spanish village" - shows up in Macedonian, too.) Greek has Chinese and Arabic.

In the comments to the Language Log post, a few German speakers describe variation in German as regional, and that may be true for the differences above.

Anyhow, the Omniglot table is here:

http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php

Hindi is not 'incomprehensible' to Arabic speakers. I reckon more of them can get by in Hindi than Farsi or Turkish. Urdu and Hindi are everywhere.

Arabs use Chinese ("Sini") as the archetype incomprehensible language.

And according to the graph, is there no language that is incomprehensible to Hindi speakers?

Cool. I'd love to see the nodes arranged geographically.

I wonder if there is a connection between English as the 'international language of business' and how the graph shows that no one finds it incomprehensible.

I doubt it. These are all pretty much figures of speech that have been in most of these languages for a while.

It would be interesting to attempt to find historical references for them and see when they came into common use.

It definitely singles out older languages.

I love the way Chinese is the only language that considers itself to be difficult.

Chinese is the perl of natural languages. (Pun intended)

So is German the Java of natural languages?

I'm sort of disappointed the graph isn't connected.

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