This document provides a summary of fun facts about various languages from around the world according to Judy Hochberg, a linguist at Fordham University. It discusses interesting tidbits about 20 languages, including that the different varieties of Arabic are generally not mutually intelligible, Basque is an isolate language unrelated to any other, and Chinese uses noun classifiers. It also notes features of languages like French's reduced pronunciation, German's multiple plural forms, and similarities between English and Hindi numbers.

1. Favorite Fun Facts
About Far-Flung Languages
Judy Hochberg
Fordham University
spanishlinguist.us

2. Why this
slideshow?
While my native language is English, and I am
highly proficient in Spanish, I have also studied
French, German, Hebrew, and Latin.
In addition, as a linguist I know a little bit about a
lot of other languages.
This presentation shares some of my favorite facts
– some well-known, some obscure – about these
languages. I didn’t include English because I only
know it ‘from the inside,’ but don’t know much
ABOUT it.
Because I am not an expert on any language here
besides Spanish, please forgive any dumb
mistakes, especially if they are accidentally
offensive. Corrections are welcome.

3. Languages
Arabic
Basque
Chinese
French
German
Guaraní
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latin
Malayalam
Nahuatl
Quechua
Russian
Spanish
Turkish
Yiddish

4. Arabic: not mutually
intelligible
The different varieties of Arabic are
not generally mutually intelligible.
For example, a Moroccan and an
Iraqi would have as much difficulty
communicating as would a Spaniard
and a Romanian.
Modern Standard Arabic serves as a
lingua franca in the Arabic-speaking
world.

5. Basque: an isolate
No other language is related to Basque
(or euskera), a language spoken in
northern Spain and southern France. If
anyone tells you otherwise, they are
espousing a crackpot theory.
An earlier form of Basque, called
Aquitanian, was spoken by one of the
three peoples Julius Caesar
encountered in Gaul:
“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,
quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam
Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua
Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur.”

6. Chinese: noun
classifiers galore
Just as English speakers say 5 sticks
of gum, 10 pairs of shoes, and 2
slices of bread, Chinese speakers
include a (usually) shape-based
noun classifier whenever they
quantify anything, be it professors
or cigarettes. There are dozens of
such classifiers.

7. French: the great eraser
Over time, changes in pronunciation have
whittled down the ends of French words,
so that in most cases you don’t
pronounce the last letter(s). This results in
annoying sound-alikes. For example,
single livre ‘book’ and plural livres ‘books’
are pronounced the same. Of a typical
verb conjugated in the present tense, the
‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he/she/it’, and ‘they’ forms are
pronounced the same: for example parle,
parles, parle, and parlent are all
pronounced /parl/.

8. German: plural plurals
There are several ways to form plurals in German.
You have to learn the correct ending for each
word, although one can discern patterns. Here are
some (not all!) plural endings:
• Some words add -n, as in Schwede/Schweden
‘Swede(s)’
• Some words add -e, as in
Friseur/Friseure ‘hairdresser(s)’
• Some words add -e and an umlaut, as in
Hand/Hände ‘hand(s)’
• Some words add -s, as in Auto/Autos ‘car(s)’
• Some words don’t change, as in
Mädchen/ Mädchen ‘girl’

9. Guaraní: balanced
bilingualism
89% of Paraguayans are bilingual in
Spanish and Guaraní, an indigenous
language spoken also in Argentina,
Bolivia, and Brazil. This has flavored
the local variety of Spanish. Two
examples:
• Paraguayans use the Guaraní
question word pa in Spanish
questions like ¿Entendiste pa?
‘Did you understand?’
• Paraguayans make a clear break
between vowels, Guaraní style,
instead of gliding between them, as
in ca-í ‘I fell’ instead of caí.

10. Hebrew: definite
agreement
In Hebrew, adjectives agree with nouns in
gender and number, as in Spanish or
German. But they also agree in
“definiteness,” if that’s a word. Definite
nouns have the prefix ha-, meaning ‘the’
– and so do adjectives that modify them!
So ‘the good books,’ for example,
translates as
ha-sefarim ha-tovim
where -im is the masculine plural ending.

11. Hindi: a close cousin
Most speakers of European languages like
English, German, and Spanish have no idea
that their language is related to Hindi and
other languages of northern India. You can
see this easily in the numbers 1-10:
ek, do, teen, chaar, paanch,
chhah, saat, aaath, nou, das
For English speakers, the similarity is clearest
for do ‘two,’ aaath ‘eight,’ and nou ‘nine.’
Spanish speakers will also recognize saat
‘siete (7)’ and das ‘diez (10).’
English, German, Spanish, Hindi, and
thousands of other languages belong to the
massive Indo-European language family.

12. Hungarian: vowel
harmony
Every word ending in Hungarian has two
versions, for example -be/-ba ‘into.’ In one
version, the vowel(s) are produced with the
tongue pushed toward the front of the
mouth, as in the vowel /e/. In the other
version, the vowel(s) are produced with the
tongue pulled back, as in /a/.
The choice of word ending depends on
whether the word itself has front or back
vowels. You can see this in the words karba
‘into the arm’ and kézbe ‘into the hand.’
Hence the term “vowel harmony.”

13. Italian: an inspired
standard
Many language standards are based on
the variety spoken in a geographic power
center. For example, English evolved from
the English of London, French from the
Parisian variety, and Spanish from
language of Castile, the region that took
the lead in the Reconquest of Spain from
700-1492.
However, standard Italian is based on the
Florentine variety used by the great
writer Dante Alighieri, rather than the
Italian of Rome, as one might expect.

14. Japanese: Complex
writing
The Japanese writing system has three different
sets of characters. There are thousands of kanji,
which are directly based on Chinese characters.
There are two much smaller sets of kana, or
phonetic characters (each represents a syllable),
that also derive from Chinese characters.
A typical written word includes one or more kanji
to express the word root, and one or more kana
to add word endings. Of the two sets of kana,
hiragana are used for native Japanese words, and
katakana for foreign words or for emphasis, like
italics in English.
Ironically, Japanese could easily be spelled with
kana or the Roman alphabet (a-z). However, the
traditional writing system is deeply ingrained in
Japanese culture.

15. Korean: an alphabetic
holiday
Koreans are tremendously proud of
their hangul alphabet! In the 15th
century, King Sejong the Great took
the lead in an effort to create a new
writing system that anyone could
learn. An annual holiday
commemorates this invention.
The alphabet is designed on
linguistic principles, with the shape
of each consonant mimicking the
position of the the mouth when
forming the sound.

16. Latin: two ways to say
‘and’
My wonderful college Latin teacher
taught us the affix -que, meaning
‘and,’ with the unforgettable
example peanut butter jelly-que.
The other word for ‘and’ was et,
which became the source of French
et, Spanish y, Italian e, and so on.
As in these languages, it was placed
between the words it joined, as in
fortunam et vitam ‘luck and life.’

17. Malayalam: a
Dravidian palindrome
The name of this language of
southern India is a palindrome!
More importantly, it is part of the
Dravidian language family, which
also includes Telugu, Tamil,
Kannada, and other widely spoken
languages. Dravidian languages
survive only in southern India
because the Indo-Europeans
migrated from the North.

18. Nahuatl: a close cousin
Nahuatl, the language of Mexico’s
ancient Aztecs, is related to
indigenous languages spoken in the
United States including Ute, Hopi,
Shoshone, and Comanche.
Almost two million Mexicans still
speak Nahuatl as their first
language.

19. Quechua: going strong
Along the spine of the Andes, almost nine million
Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Bolivians, and
Argentinians still speak a form of Quechua, the
language of the ancient Incas. This makes Quechua the
most-spoken indigenous language of the Americas.
In comparison, Navajo, the most-spoken indigenous
language of the United States, has fewer than two
hundred thousand speakers.
Quechua has flavored Andean Spanish. For example,
Andean speakers tend to change /e/ and /o/, which
Quechua lacks, to /i/ and /u/, as in siñur for señor. They
also use the verb dar ‘to give’ with the gerund to form
commands, as in Dame hacienda tal cosa ‘Do that for
me,’ literally ‘Give me doing that thing.’

20. Russian: gendered
verbs
In Indo-European languages, all nouns
have gender: masculine, feminine, and
sometimes neuter. Articles, pronouns,
and adjectives have to agree in gender
with the nouns they refer to or modify.
However, verbs do not indicate gender.
Russian is an exception because past
tense verbs have masculine and feminine
forms. Apparently this is the case because
they started as adjectives.

21. Spanish: Not so easy
Many students sign up to learn
Spanish thinking that it’s easy, but in
fact it’s pretty hard. There are many
verb tenses and irregular verbs. The
pronoun system is complicated, too.
There are also subtle contrasts such as
ser and estar (both mean ‘to be’),
saber and conocer (‘to know’), por and
para (‘for’), tocar and jugar (‘to play’),
doler and lastimar (‘to hurt’), and so
on. Plus...accent marks.

22. Turkish: easiest for
babies?
When I was studying for my PhD in linguistics,
I learned that Turkish is the easiest language
for babies to learn. Apparently a two-year-old
can speak perfect Turkish.
This is partly because the language’s rules
have no exceptions: for example, there are no
irregular verbs. Additionally, the language is
agglutinative, meaning that each word
ending expresses a single nuance of meaning
instead of combining them. (In comparison,
the Spanish -o verb ending means first person
+ singular + present tense + indicative mood.)
I earned my PhD in the 1980s, so I have no
idea whether people still believe this.

23. Yiddish: borrower
extreme
Yiddish is a form of 9th century High
German that Jewish emigrants
brought with them to Eastern
Europe and then around the world.
It is written in Hebrew letters, but is
unrelated to Hebrew, a Semitic
language.
Although the core vocabulary of
Yiddish is still Germanic, the
language has borrowed vocabulary
extensively from Hebrew, Slavic,
and Romance languages.