5 Of The Weirdest Languages In The World | Random Thursday

all life-forms communicate it's just kind of part of being a life-form even single-celled bacteria communicate with other bacteria through chemical signals same holds true for the cells in our bodies trees communicate through the color their flowers to bees who pollinate the trees and then fly off to their nest and communicate to the other bees where the trees are and dogs communicate by whining at the back door for hours one of the coolest forms of communication I've ever heard of is with dolphins because dolphins have the ability to echolocate using clicks in the water which allows them to see through the sound much further than their eyes can see sound waves travel through water five times faster than in the air and they bounce off of objects they get picked back up by the dolphin and they're able to sort of visually interpret them and actually see through these sound waves now that's pretty cool but it gets like a thousand times cooler when you realize that dolphins don't just have the ability to receive these kinds of signals they have the ability to send them as well so if a dolphin sees say a world war two plane on the ocean floor and they want to show that to somebody else they can just go to another dolphin recreate that echo pattern through their clicks to the other dolphin and the other dolphin will see literally see the plane it's like if he asked me what somebody look like and I was able to just sort of like transmit a photo into your head I mean that's like some kind of superpower or something but dolphins can actually do that it's insanely cool yeah this isn't a video about dolphins humans may not have the communication superpowers that dolphins have we have come up with a lot of really creative and clever ways to combine these flaps in our throat our tongue our lips and our teeth to communicate information to each other that's a fancy-pants way of saying we do language good let's be honest all languages are weird in different ways I mean I speak English but English is one of the weirdest languages out there but it can be understood through tough thorough thought though just like tear and tear pronounced the same way but tear and tear are pronounced differently and I always like to point out that if Will Smith ever started doing metal work creating celebrity likenesses of people in metal you might have to ask yourself will Will Smith Smith Wilson in really every language has weird things like that in it they all have weird rules and even weirder exceptions to every rule and that's because the language is a living thing it evolves over time there's a great video I'll share here that actually talks about how far back you would have to go in time before you couldn't recognize English anymore because middle English is you know kind of like a very strong dialect that might be a challenge to interpret but Old English it's just a completely different language the point is all languages are weird but there are some superlatives that standout languages that break the rules at all the other languages seem to follow and have little just quirks that nobody else seems to have so here's a list of some of the weirdest number five the P dot had language yeah just a heads up there's gonna be a lot of like isolated tribes in this so the P dot language is spoken by the P now have people in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and it's actually really controversial because wait for it it doesn't use recursion no recursion I mean come on that's explained if that indirect recursion is a linguistic property of language that allows you to sort of input phrases into other phrases it's also called nesting sometimes like you can go from the cat is running to the cat that got out of the house is running see it's are like the phrase within a phrase and yeah this ability to add information to information in a sentence is something that's kind of universal amongst most languages in fact Noam Chomsky popularized this idea back in the 50s and he was studying languages trying to look for what he called universal grammar sort of the primordial ways of speaking that every language kind of falls into that just kind of Springs out of our brain patterns and the way we process language and recursion was one of the things that he put on that list and it's been sort of linguistic Dogma ever since and then dr. Dan Evert studied the pitaka people back in the 1970s versus a missionary and then later coming back as searcher the paper in 2005 he claimed that the piraha language actually does not have recursion which flew in the face of all linguistic dogma it just burned the foundations of linguistics to the ground it made international news so it caused quite a stir and it has its critics some people question his methodology but if true this will be the only language in the world that does not allow new information to come into sentences every single sentence would be a small simple statement that stands on its own but Danny Averett also said that this language doesn't have any words for numbers or colors so they just describe things as light or dark and they describe numbers there's just many or few and it's going to point out that this isn't because they're simple-minded in any way it's just that this particular culture emphasizes the importance of the here and the now and concrete matters so it just doesn't really need it and even people who are skeptical of his recursion claims agree that they don't use color names and numbers so that's a real thing moving on the Amara language why liquids eat away katate kumite ha hey madam arrow ha Honua made a patch anakin 'has candy so the mother language isn't some small tucked away isolated language and only a few people speak there's actually like 3.5 million people that speak this language it's actually one of the official languages of the nation of Bolivia but the reason it's on this list is because of a little quirk that seems to be unique to the amount which is they have an interesting way of describing the past in the future so English speakers in most languages around the world refer to the future is something that's ahead of them in the past of something that's behind them the idea being of course if you're walking somewhere then what's ahead of you is something that you have not gotten to yet it's something that's in your future and things that are behind you are things that you have passed in your past but the amount of flip that they talk about things from their past as being in front of them and things in their future being behind them why would they do that and the answer is actually just a simple flip of perception they consider so they consider the future being something that is not known something that can't be seen so they describe it as being behind them whereas the past which is known which has been seen is in front of them because you can see it you know so they might say that they're gonna look ahead into their memories or if they've got some big plans behind them and one might possibly assume that this says something about their culture about the way they value known versus unknown things but I don't know anybody's in that culture so I would be speculating but still interesting the language there's no way I got that right ah motor power and oh sorry man he said I do not know him I think it out - there's no secret that there are several languages in sub-saharan Africa that use click sounds as continents along with other regular vowel sounds but the language is considered one of the most complex just like there are many different types of percussive sounds in English speaking like your your B's your P's and your sounds this has five different types of click sounds in their language with 17 accompanying click sounds and it also features four vowel sounds with four varying tones so this language isn't just difficult to learn it's actually kind of impossible for a non-native speaker to make some of these tones because it takes years of training your voice to be able to do this in fact Tony Trail who was considered one of the largest Western experts on this language developed a lump on his larynx and what he found out later was that all native speakers have developed this lump on their larynx from speaking this language a language that actually changes your physiology you're gonna need more than rosetta stone to learn this one the Google human third language well had something weird in Australia come on in a muppet I know MA Nina Moffat I know ma mère : my Nana man might Olga Kay know MA kappa r kappa react and i'm jerry anger mo Colma go ya master is an ancient language that's been spoken by Aboriginal people in Australia for thousands of years specifically the GU GU giveth their people in the Far North Queensland in fact it was actually the first Aboriginal language that had ever been written down when James Cook visited Australia and 1770 and it's where the word Kangaroo comes from and in practice it's not that much weirder than any other language except for one exception which is the way that they describe directions and that thing is that the way they describe directions they always use cardinal directions meaning directions on the map north south west and east they don't have words for left and right or front and back so if you want to tell somebody to hold something in their left hand you would tell them to hold it in their west hand or north east south whichever direction their hand is facing you know you wouldn't just say put that over there you would say move it south five steps every other language in the world has egocentric directions which are directions that are relative to where the speaker is but this one doesn't it's different so what this means is that the speaker has to be aware of what direction they are facing at all times it's like they've woven a layer of geographic directions into their language and into their culture like you literally can't convey information without knowing that and not unrelated Aboriginal people are famously incredible trackers and hunters and navigators and I mean almost to the point that many people think it's like supernatural or something but many people who study this say that it might just be because this language sort of embeds all that into their culture so did they develop this as a way of sort of surviving the harsh Australian landscape or is this just like a funny little quirk that kind of worked out in their favor no really tell me I don't know and last but so not least Silvo Camero Michael Merritt is an island specifically one of the Spanish Canary Islands on the northwest coast of Africa and on this tiny island they speak a language called silbo Camero which is not spoken anywhere else in the world and it's famous and interesting and unique for one specific reason and that reason is its spoken with whistles whistles [Music] it's literally like a whistle form of Spanish using to whistled vowels and for whistled consonants and I know you're probably thinking WTF man why did these people like turn themselves into birds and my answer is okay like you don't want to be a bird but the better answer is that la gomera is a very rocky and craggy Island with tall peaks and deep ravines separating people and whistles just travel further as a sound then voices do so this became a way of conveying information across those distances parently the earliest north african native speakers used this to communicate with each other and then when the Spanish took it over they just kind of adopted it themselves and based it off a Spanish of course today with our fancy cell phones this kind of language is not as important as it used to be but it's still demonstrated for tourists it's a fun tourist draw and they're doing their best to kind of save the language in schools and whatnot so as I said at the beginning there are countless weird languages out there and even though the major languages have really weird things as a part of them but I like that I like languages I like dialects and regional you know idioms and stuff I like how culture and forms the language and vice versa you know it's it's kind of like evolution you might find some animal that has some really weird feature to it but then when you kind of break it down and you look at their environment you realize that it actually serves a very useful purpose and language is kind of the same way so share your favorite weird language that you've heard of or weird things and the language that you speak in the comments down below this could be a fun conversation all right thanks for watching t-shirts available at the store answers a joke on slash shirts this one I just used the planet because there's people on the planet and people speak languages so there there are all kinds of fun and nerdy shirts that are cool designs and stuff and people seem to like him I think you'll like them too anyway answers jokes let's go get out please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this video Google things you like that and maybe check out some of the other videos on sidebar if Google is nice enough to recommend me and know if you like them please do subscribe because I come back with videos on science and fun just interesting topics every Monday and every Thursday and with that I will bid you adieu it's a different language thanks a lot for watching you guys go out now have an opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 963,536

Rating: 4.8780556 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, language, silbo gomero, guugu Yimithirr, aboriginal language, australia, african click language, !Xóõ, Aymara Language, Bolivia, Piraha language, amazon tribe, brazil, recursion, dan everett, noam chomsky, universal grammar

Id: gybTMf_Xa10

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Belligero_]

Guess I'm not very patient today.

Was initially interested in watching the video but after listening to him ramble about random shit for half the video, had to turn it off. Would rather he got to the point for each one.

[u/ShockaBoo]

Very cool. I’m also a language teacher so I think it’s interesting. I probably wouldn’t use ‘weird’ in the title though.