unforum

[shaumac]

On my copy of this card it appears as though Wales is separated from England by the same faint grey line that separates the other countries from their neighbours. I can't see whether Scotland is similarly separated.

Could anyone confirm whether this appears to be the case on their cards as well?

shaumac

[Fuseunderground]

There is definitely no line separating Wales or Scotland on my card

Rich

[echidna]

Maybe it's something to do with the names of the countires in their native tongue; in which case, according to my encyclopaedia, you get:

[girlwithnolife]

I tried it for you and it didn't work - sorry

[Guin]

just thinking aloud here sorry its turned into a long one):

Vons clue and the name of the card would suggest first language.

Wiki has a good bit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_speaker

Mother tongue being the first language a person learns seems to stand out for me.

The difficulty is the link between the assorted contries / nations identified on the map. PIE would certainly explain several of these - however as chimera245 points out Japan.

however this may be answered here:

http://www.robotwisdom.com/science/pie/

where we are told:

[corrina]

I'm thinking that there must be another link between these countries as Greece is missing and Greek is part of the Indo European make up. Going off on a completely different tangent I was thinking maybe it is the countries that are missing that we should be looking at? Probably not but its just an idea.

I have tried and failed with

[The Wizard]

anyone tried

[corrina]

Can confirm it's not

[Guin]

i can confirm it isnt

[doublecross]

My guess is that the answer will depend on the precise choice of countries, whether it's languages, capitals, initials, or whatever. Putting them in an order and choosing what feature is required is the challenge.

One thought I had is that in only about half the countries given did the language they speak today originate there (e.g. Spain, Netherlands, Japan, but not Brazil, USA or New Caledonia). Don't know if that helps.

[echidna]

I'm not convinced that we're looking for a common ancestor or link to all these languages.

One of the main sticking points to all these theories is Japan. Japanese is classified as belonging to it's own language group - Japonic - the only other members of which are the Ryukyuan languages. Among scholars it's considered highly debatable whether the Japonic languages are related to any other existant languages but they are definitely not descendents of Chinese as someone suggested. There's a useful article on the Wiki about this. The only other language native to Japan that I could find was Ainu which is considered a language isolate as is Korean which provides a further sticking point.

The theory that all these languages had a common pre-PIE (sorry - that's probably really bad grammar) ancestor is considered pretty speculative. Again, according to the Wiki:

[Stratman]

For those looking at the languages aspect of each country - just came across this...

http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp

I am at work (just leaving) and did not have time to have much of a look, but sheesh, it lists 42 living languages for Angola alone!

[rockhound]

mother tongue

[Belogroak]

This really is a curious card.

I am more surprised by the countries that are missing. For example Germany, Australia and Canada rule out most connections with the UK and US.

The only thing I could come up with was:

[manleym]

I found this in my desk at work this morning maybe it may be of some significance?