http://www.starchamber.com/2010/01/quasartupilussuusinnaavoq.html Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology. Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:08:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.starchamber.com/2010/01/quasartupilussuusinnaavoq.html/comment-page-1#comment-153112 Rachel Cobleigh Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:32:22 +0000 http://www.starchamber.com/?p=3783#comment-153112 One of my professors, Arnie Rosenberg, wrote this delightful little paper, <a href="http://www.cs.umass.edu/~rsnbrg/hardest.pdf" rel="nofollow">The Hardest Natural Languages</a>. It wasn't intended to be serious; he submitted it to a linguistics journal for fun, expecting it to be soundly rejected and instead it was accepted. They even invited him to come and give a talk on it. He lit up when he described the meeting to me, because he'd invented an operator symbol to describe the concept "language A is considered harder than language B" that looked like the word "oy", but with the 'o' and the 'y' joined together. Since this operator could be used transitively (by his invention), he could string together a bunch of relationships to "prove" that A is considered harder than C, which was represented as A oy oy oy oy C. :-) One of my professors, Arnie Rosenberg, wrote this delightful little paper, The Hardest Natural Languages. It wasn’t intended to be serious; he submitted it to a linguistics journal for fun, expecting it to be soundly rejected and instead it was accepted. They even invited him to come and give a talk on it. He lit up when he described the meeting to me, because he’d invented an operator symbol to describe the concept “language A is considered harder than language B” that looked like the word “oy”, but with the ‘o’ and the ‘y’ joined together. Since this operator could be used transitively (by his invention), he could string together a bunch of relationships to “prove” that A is considered harder than C, which was represented as A oy oy oy oy C. :-)

]]> http://www.starchamber.com/2010/01/quasartupilussuusinnaavoq.html/comment-page-1#comment-152968 Ned Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:53:47 +0000 http://www.starchamber.com/?p=3783#comment-152968 Saját légpárnás tele van angolnák. <a href="http://translate.google.com/#hu|en|Saj%C3%A1t%20l%C3%A9gp%C3%A1rn%C3%A1s%20tele%20van%20angoln%C3%A1k." rel="nofollow">*</a> Saját légpárnás tele van angolnák. *

]]> http://www.starchamber.com/2010/01/quasartupilussuusinnaavoq.html/comment-page-1#comment-152957 Mike O Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:51:41 +0000 http://www.starchamber.com/?p=3783#comment-152957 That's why it's so important to have a proper English-Hungarian Phrase Book. That’s why it’s so important to have a proper English-Hungarian Phrase Book.

]]> http://www.starchamber.com/2010/01/quasartupilussuusinnaavoq.html/comment-page-1#comment-152889 Alan Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:50:47 +0000 http://www.starchamber.com/?p=3783#comment-152889 Just for fun I Googled "considered the hardest language to learn" and the top 12 mentions were these (keeping in mind that these were all some form of blog comment, not official sources): English - 7 Mandarin - 2 Icelandic - 1 Japanese - 1 ...and according to ChaCha.com, the British Foreign Office has stated that the most difficult language to learn for adult English speakers is Hungarian. Just for fun I Googled “considered the hardest language to learn” and the top 12 mentions were these (keeping in mind that these were all some form of blog comment, not official sources):
English – 7
Mandarin – 2
Icelandic – 1
Japanese – 1
…and according to ChaCha.com, the British Foreign Office has stated that the most difficult language to learn for adult English speakers is Hungarian.

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