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by rekoros 1645 days ago
Mainly because it is not closely related to any other Indo-European language - not an easy feat.
1 comments
thaumasiotes 1645 days ago
How are we counting? Greek forms its own branch of Indo-European, notable for how easy it is to distinguish from other Indo-European languages.

Being different from "other similar languages" mostly just means a history involving more being conquered than conquering.

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rekoros 1645 days ago
I'm not a linguist, so I don't really know.

But, even middle-of-Europe Hungarian is related - somewhat - to Khanty and Mansi, and to a lesser extent to Finnish.

I just think it's kind of incredible when a language exists in the center of Europe in 2021 that isn't quite related to anything.

Armenian and Greek qualify as well, but they're much more prominent than Albanian - so, less mysterious :-)

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mdp2021 1645 days ago
> it's kind of incredible when a language exists in the center of Europe ... that isn't quite related to anything

Presumably, one factor is being "prisoners of Geography" (expression of Tim Marshall).

See the map https://decolonialatlas.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/raised-r...

from Anton Balazh ( https://www.shutterstock.com/g/antartis?irgwc=1&utm_medium=A... ),

...Hungary is in a way a protected "Inner Carpathia".

Also quite visible on OpenTopoMap, https://opentopomap.org/#map=6/46.800/19.116

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thaumasiotes 1645 days ago
> But, even middle-of-Europe Hungarian is related - somewhat - to Khanty and Mansi, and to a lesser extent to Finnish.

> I just think it's kind of incredible when a language exists in the center of Europe in 2021 that isn't quite related to anything.

But we just stipulated that Albanian is an Indo-European language. It's much more closely related to the general run of European languages than Magyar or Finnish is. The language isolate in Europe is Basque.

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rekoros 1644 days ago
Yeah, that's true - "not quite related to anything" is definitely wrong word choice here.

Perhaps a better way to say it is "it's so impossible to understand, I can't believe it's actually related to anything" :-)

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andrewzah 1645 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_isolate

The largest one is likely Korean.

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_language#Classificati...

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