What's a language whose existence baffles you?

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Any Celtic language, really.

Well, it's not so much the languages themselves, but how they decided to represent them with Latin letters. It makes no sense. I mean, how we choose to represent English phonemes with Latin letters is inconsistent and makes no sense, but it's even worse in Celtic languages.

If you didn't know Irish, would you guess that "Siobhan" is pronounced "Shiv-AWN", and is supposed to be a transliteration of "Jehanne"?
 
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Zero Day Defense said:
Any Celtic language, really.

Well, it's not so much the languages themselves, but how they decided to represent them with Latin letters. It makes no sense. I mean, how we choose to represent English phonemes with Latin letters is inconsistent and makes no sense, but it's even worse in Celtic languages.

If you didn't know Irish, would you guess that "Siobhan" is pronounced "Shiv-AWN", and is supposed to be a transliteration of "Jehanne"?
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Shit like this is why I am an advocate for the creation of a "Celtic Alphabet" to replace the current buchering of the Latin Alphabet Celtic languages currently use.
I don't know what it would look like or how it would work. All I know is this "Siobhan" being pronounced as "Shiv-AWN" shit needs to stop.
 
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Chongqing said:
It's crazy to me that Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic are still used and taught as languages.

I feel like that region should be speaking English or Russian.
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American Scandinavian. My family abandoned the Norse languages when we became 'Mericans. Nobody in my family even has a Scandi first name. Many younger Scandinavians are bilingual because ain't nobody got time to learn a language that only a couple million people are native speakers. We speak English because nobody is going to speak our languages.
 
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Gonna list a few not mentioned yet:

Pirahã - https://youtu.be/SHv3-U9VPAs - spoken by an Amazonian tribe that's too retarded to know even the most basic of mathematics
Pitjantjatjara - https://youtu.be/N58ocvTM42U - this and other Australian aboriginal languages are probably the most inefficient languages ever (along with Navajo)
Warlpiri - https://youtu.be/CvKQdOtSDtA - see above
Navajo - https://youtu.be/r2y95OynlC8 - janky ass script
Ubykh - https://youtu.be/7pCUOcmGuso - Caucasian (as in "Muslim mountain nomad tribe thingies", not "white") language, became severely endangered and then extinct because of the Circassian genocide, has the most consonants of any non-click language
 
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It's weird to me that English has become such a big language, just based on how it sounds. Obviously I know why it's so big historically. It's one of the more ugly sounding languages imo, though. I wish the world language was something prettier.
 
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