

Directed Graph of Which Human Language Is Incomprehensible to Most People - tokenadult
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024

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albertsun
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>

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armandososa
"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).

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telemachos
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>

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mahmud
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.

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

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

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coderdude
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.

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davidw
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It would be interesting to attempt to find historical references for them and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.

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sliverstorm
It definitely singles out older languages.

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

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

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arethuza
So is German the Java of natural languages?

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sid0
I'm sort of disappointed the graph isn't connected.

