The map itself isn’t so impressive, but it’s an interesting thought. Someone made a cartogram of many different languages’ point of reference to other languages as ones that seem unintelligible.
“Mutual incomprehension results from the right mixture of inter-lingual proximity and unintelligibility. In the Middle Ages, for example, when the monks’ knowledge of Greek was waning, they would write in the margin of texts they could not translate, in Latin: “Graecum est, non legitur” (”This is Greek to me, I can’t read it”).”
