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by dnda 4739 days ago
Seems like they are just counting the weird features of languages. It is correct that language like Turkish (probably Hungarian as well) is least weird because it does not have any of the weird features like word gender, irregular verbs, prefixes etc. But two main features of language, extreme inflection and vowel harmony makes learning it difficult.
1 comments

I suspect that Turkish scores low on the weird score as it was reformed in the 20th century. Prior to it's reformation it was a language mostly only spoken and occasionally shoehorned into a more ornate language's arabic script (called Osmanci - pronounced Oss-mann-juh).

Turkish was the language the lower and middle Turkish classes typically used during the Ottoman period. When the language reforms came in not long after the establishment of the modern Turkish republic, they were specifically designed with the idea of unifying the people by language and being easy to learn to read and write, which is how Turkey went from a literacy rate of 30% to 70% in just a few years.

Turkish is weird to a western european, but once you get past the initial weirdness is probably the most regular and structured language you'll ever learn. Which you'll find exceptionally weird if you've ever tried to queue for a ferry ticket in Turkey (which is not regular or structured at all).