Yesterday I posted about another blog that ranked languages in terms of “weirdness”, which made the claim that Spanish, German and English were much weirder, in comparison with other languages, than Euskara. Well, another blog, this one from the Language Log at the University of Pennsylvania describes some issues with this analysis. In particular, a number of the comments on that blog delve into a lot of questions (as an aside, I am extremely envious of the 54 comments that posting has received! 🙂

They point to limitations of the WALS database, the fact that the analysis only used 21 factors in its weighting, and that defining weirdness is a bit arbitrary.

Just thought, for the sake of rigor, I should share this discussion.