That’s part of the second-largest language family, the Sino-Tibetan languages, so they’re not special snowflakes either.
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People can be really understanding on both sides of the Atlantic. 
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I don’t know about Bask, but I understand Japanese is the sole member of the Japonic language family and that linguistic historians have little idea how its related to any other language… that said, their writing system is mostly derived from written Chinese… kanji means Chinese character and I understand most Japanese kanji have the same idiomatic meaning in Chinese, though the Japanese use a somewhat small subset of those used in traditional written Chinese(no idea how it compares with simplified Chinese) and I understand hiragana and katakana are believed to have developed as simplified way of writing things phonetically… I also understand most Japanese kanji have both a native Japanese pronunciation and a borrowed Chinese pronunciation… Though I understand there’s also a lot of flexibility to combine kanji with one meaning with furigana that provide a unrelated pronunciation, which is often used forword play in Japanese literature that is hard to translate.
Though, on the not of pronouns and plurals versus singular, I find it interesting that Japanse has not only a singular first person pronoun and a plural first person, but a first person specifically for pairs… Well, kind of… the most general word for I in Japanese is watashi(there’s also boku, which is generally considered masculine and youthful and atashi, which is feminine and I think might carry an air of refinement) and the most general word for we is Watashitachi -tachi being an honorific with a meaning along the lines of"and those with a person", comparable to the English expression “and company” when put after a person’s name. But there’s also Futari, which is we for specifically two people, though it’s also related to one of the words for two(compare futago, twins and futanari, hermaphrodite, the literal meaning being along the lines of two gnders or two sexes).
Though, now I’m curious, is it total coincidence that the English word sex is so similar to the Latin for six or is their some euphemistic connection that has been forgotten over the centuries. I get the impression the Romans weren’t all that prudish, but I do associate a lot of modern prudishness with Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, am not entirely sure how far back that prudishness goes, and Latin was the main liturgical language for a long time.
It’s not, actually; the Ryukyuan languages and Hachijo language are also surviving members of that family, although they are not widely spoken today because of assimilationist policies after Imperial Japan annexed the islands where they are spoken.
There’s also a decent possibility they’re related to Korean, although this is not yet proven and for political reasons proving it is an unpopular idea.
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I’ve just started learning Chinese, but afaik there’s not a reallly big deal with simplified Chinese. Some signs are simply simplified/reduced a bit, that’s all.
I have the “Latinum” (Latin examen) but I forgot a lot about Latin since I have left school. Afaik there’s no link (regarding meaning) between the Latin word “sex” for six and “sex” for gender. They are just written and spoken the same way.
It’s a total coincidence. In Latin, VI = sex and sex = sexus, which are even more similar, but this is also a total coincidence.
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Six sexy saxophones.
…what? Great name for a band.
Well, not “great”.
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In Tamsyn Muir’s (excellent) Locked Tomb series, all of the citizens of the Empire belong to one of nine numbered houses, and all have surnames which are taken from the number of their house in various languages. (Names of characters in the first book include Pent, Hect, Quinn, Tettares, Chatur, Asht and Octakiseron.)
This gives us the title of the spin-off story: The Mysterious Study of Dr Sex. The story’s teenage protagonists find the name “Dr Sex” exactly as amusing as teenagers from Earth would.
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That brings me to another linguistic phenomenon: Names: Parents naming their children.
In Germany the civil status office has to approve every name. You can’t name your child for example UFO or idiot or car. Of course you can call your child with another name in your house or whereever. But the official name is restricted.
And I’ve read that Chinese never name their children after other people. Which is not uncommon here in Germany (naming after a relative or celeb or movie character etc.)
Regarding German names, this movie, How About Adolf?, is absolutely hilarious.
I like its original title.
When I first started working on parser IF in Hittite, I believed there was no evidence for what the Hittites called their compass directions. (Well, cardinal directions. Compasses hadn’t been invented yet, but because of the sun, a lot of societies end up with the same four primary directions anyway.)
Turns out some evidence was discovered fairly recently! By analyzing lunar omen texts, Mathis Kreitzscheck figured out that north was taršmenaš ḫuwanz “the ??? wind”, east was ekunaš ḫuwanz “the cold wind”, south was šalliš ḫuwanz “the great wind”, and west was appeziš ḫuwanz “the back wind”.
Also, lunar omen texts are interesting.
If the moon is surrounded by a triple halo, where one halo opens to the east, one halo [is complete?], but the gate in one halo opens west: the king of Šubartu will open hostilities against the king of Amurru. The weapons of the king of Šubartu will be dreadful against the land of Amurru. Nothing will happen to the king of Elam and the king of Ḫatti.
It seems like the Hittites associated each direction with one of the major powers in the area, and a lunar halo opening toward that direction meant that power would go to war. Which halo was first indicated the winner (but unfortunately we don’t know whether the Hittites called the innermost or outermost halo the “first”).
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I’m curious: is it possible to make a very reasonable inference from other things that we know about them and their language?
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Great question! It seems like it should be possible, either from knowledge of other Hittite omen texts or from how lunar omens were done over in Mesopotamia, but I don’t have enough cultural knowledge and Kreitzscheck didn’t want to speculate.
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I mean, speculating about that sort of thing is how we solve IF puzzles. Send him a couple veteran IF players and that mystery’ll be solved in no time! 
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Now I’m curious where our modern words for North, South, East, and West came from and whether they pre or post date the invention of the navigator’s compass… and whether the navigator’s compass and the geometer’s compass have a shared etymology or if its a linguistic coincidence we use the word compass for both tools.
Also makes me wonder if any civilizations had a direction system based around a number other than 4 or 8… like maybe a culture where a variant of clock directions was dominant instead of compass directions or where there was an odd number ofdirections. And were there any civilizations far enough north that the sun isn’t a good way to define an east-west line?
On a somewhat related note, how universal is deviding the lunar cycle into 4/8 phases and the year into 4 seasons(at least among temperate zone civilizations, I’m guessing tropical civilizations wouldn’t notice much in the way of changing temperatures or changing day lengths)?
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Oh, they’re very old. Old enough that, while they can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European in some form, historical linguists aren’t really certain what the derivation is for most of them. The one they seem most sure of is that “east” is derived from a root word meaning “to shine,” because that’s where the sun rises. It’s theorized that the words for the other directions also relate to positions of the sun, but it’s less clear in what way.
As for “compass”, looks like the sailors got the word from the geometers, “perhaps because it is round and has a point similar to the mathematical instrument” per Etymonline, which I find to be a pretty good source for answering questions of the nature of “are these two words related?” or “which use of this word appeared first?”
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A very funny name. I’ve heard a lot of people say good things about The Locked Tomb series, but haven’t actually decided if I want to read it or not. The setting seems interesting, though. I may read the short story later.
When I saw Dr. Sex, my mind immediately jumped to the real-life Dr. Sex, real name Zhang Jingsheng (張競生). An infamous sexologist who was nicknamed Dr. Sex by his detractors. Born 1888 and died 1970. One of the funniest and yet most tragic wikipedia pages I’ve read in a while (also NSFW, as you’d expect).
On a side note, Chinese lists directions starting from the east, not the north: instead of north/east/south/west, you say east/south/west/north. Still using the same directions, though, and going clockwise.
The Pirahã people have a directional system that may interest you. They’re indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. I recently read a book review of Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, a book by a linguist from the US who spent years learning the Pirahã language. From the book review:
On multiple occasions, he accompanies them on hunting or foraging trips into the jungle and invariably gets lost; his companions find their way around with ease. Later, he talks about his frustrations trying to find out the terms for “left” and “right” – as usual, the answers he gets are contradictory and apparently random. The puzzle clicks into place when he eventually figures out that Pirahãs orient themselves not relative to their own body, but relative to the river Maici. The directions aren’t “left” and “right” and “forwards” and “back”: They are “upriver”, “downriver”, “into the jungle” and “to the river”. How clever is that ? When you’re in the jungle, knowing where the river is is a question of life and death. If you have to express directions in absolute terms all the time, you learn orienteering from the moment you start talking, with the river as your fixed point of reference.
I haven’t read the original book, though. The review further notes that the original book was controversial and received a lot of criticism, since many suspected the linguist of exaggerating, or just lying.
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Yeah, there’s a lot of controversy around Everett’s work on Pirahã.
But we don’t have to take Everett’s word for it here! A lot of languages around Australia and Oceania use these sorts of absolute directions. This paper is a bit eye-wateringly dense, but it provides a nice survey of the variations.
It seems like often, societies that use absolute directions (in daily life—“look to the east” instead of “look to your right”) will establish one directional axis based on easy-to-observe geography like “seaward/landward” or “upriver/downriver” and the other axis perpendicular to it. These axes don’t need to be straight: the Manam language is spoken on a small round island and has the basic directions “seaward/landward” and “clockwise/counterclockwise”. But there seems to be a strong inclination toward two perpendicular axes, whatever they might be.
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Mesopotamia went south-north-east-west; the Hittites seem to have started with east, but the order of the others is less clear. In Mesopotamia in fact you can abbreviate them in writing as “dir 1”, “dir 2”, “dir 3”, and “dir 4” in that order, because their love for accounting knew no bounds.
And the geometers got it from a Late Latin word for “circle, closed path”: the first part is con “with” and the second part is pass “pass, trail, route”, so a route that returns to its beginning.
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