[Editor’s note: This cartogram shows which languages cultures point to when they “just don’t get it”. Thanks Michael!]
Republished from StrangeMaps.
Originally published February 26, 2009.
“When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word of what someone says, he or she states that it’s ‘Greek to me’. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it ’sounds like Chinese’. I’ve been told the Korean equivalent is ’sounds like Hebrew’,†says Yuval Pinter (here on the excellent Languagelog).
Which begs the question: “Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?†Well apparently there has, even if only perfunctorily, and the result is this cartogram.