Languages

If you were lucky enough to catch last night's inebriated anti-fun rant, you might guess that I've spent the day drowsy, resentful, and brain-dead. And you'd be right. I am not nearly sharp enough to function passably on three hours of sleep, even if I define "functioning" as "being able to write in a personal blog that hardly anyone reads." Not a particularly high bar, to be sure.

So instead, a few factoids from the exciting world of ethnic/linguistic geography.

- Papua New Guinea alone has at least 830 distinct languages.

- The Lemba tribe of southern Zimbabwe is descended from the Cohen tribe of Israel.

- Maltese is kind of a fusion between Arabic and Italian.

- Hindi and Urdu are close to being the same language, though written in Sanskrit and Arabic characters respectively. The language spoken in most Bollywood films is supposedly closer to Urdu than it is to official Hindi.

- Indonesia chose a version of Malay as its official language because it was easy to learn, not because any significant percentage of Indonesians actually spoke it--they didn't. Javanese was actually the largest language group in Indonesia, but the government considered it unworkable because it was a difficult language to learn.

- Don't be surprised if any of these factoids are somewhat incorrect. I am in no condition for fact-checking.