Clueless linguistics remark of the day

[muckefuck]

"Oh, they speak more than one language in Nigeria?"

(Honestly, this even beats discovering Edo Nyland for the first time and taking his ideas seriously.)

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

You think that's bad? Someone I know into Eurovision one time asked me, "Why does Belgium always send songs in French or Dutch? Why don't they ever send anything in the Belgian language??" -_-

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it...why is that?

[bunj.livejournal.com]

Clearly, they need some monks to create it for them.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Did you know that the Belgian language has 518 words for "beer"?

[bunj.livejournal.com]

And none for "ice cubes". Go figure.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I think for "ice cube" they just use the Eskimo word.

NIGERIA?

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

Back in the last Ice Age, I corresponded, with a girl in Lagos Nigeria (she was Ibo)
Her name.. I will never forget ... was Oludoton Untouugo. I remember her casually mentioning that there were 2 main languages spoken with lots of differing dialect, all of which seemed to be along tribal lines

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Most experts would call that an oversimplification. There are actually three language families native to Nigeria (not including Indo-European, although English and English-based creoles are spoken natively there), each with an assortment of varieties. Of the three major languages, Igbo and Yoruba are both Niger-Congo languages, whereas Hausa belongs to Afro-Asiatic, and is thus distantly related to Ge'ez and Hebrew!