Foreign Language~
At present there are about 6,900 known languages. Mandarin is the most widely spoken, followed by Spanish, English, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and German.
There is almost certainly no human being who speaks all of them, and to make matters worse, many languages are dying out.
About half of the world's languages are expected to die out within the next century. It is estimated that the last fluent speaker of a language dies every 10 days or so. Almost 550 languages have fewer than 100 fluent speakers still alive.
There have been some notable efforts around the world to save dying languages, but it's not easy. If someone asks, ''Who cares?" I hasten to add that this is a great pity. Languages contain information about the histories and interactions of people and hold information about the way the brain works.
For example, Noam Chomsky, whom many of you will know from his political work, suggested about 50 years ago that the human brain is intrinsically wired for language. This suggested looking at the various different languages in the world to see if there are any features common to all of them, which would suggest something common to all brains.
But this idea is not panning out. Instead, it seems that languages have enormous flexibility in structure, which had not been anticipated. Some languages have structures that are very strange to an English speaker. Spanish, for example, makes all objects either masculine or feminine in a way that is only rarely used in English (as in, for example, ''She's a fine ship."). Russian speakers have no simple way to say ''the apple" as distinct from ''an apple," yet Russians seem to function fine.
Some of the Native American languages are structured so that when one makes a statement, one also has to say how one knows that the statement is true. In other words, you say things a little differently depending on whether you're talking about something you saw yourself or are relaying a story from someone else. In fact, there are as many as 18 fine gradations in expressing why one believes a statement to be true when one makes it. (I can imagine this would be of interest in the legal system.)
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
At present there are about 6,900 known languages. Mandarin is the most widely spoken, followed by Spanish, English, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and German.
There is almost certainly no human being who speaks all of them, and to make matters worse, many languages are dying out.
About half of the world's languages are expected to die out within the next century. It is estimated that the last fluent speaker of a language dies every 10 days or so. Almost 550 languages have fewer than 100 fluent speakers still alive.
There have been some notable efforts around the world to save dying languages, but it's not easy. If someone asks, ''Who cares?" I hasten to add that this is a great pity. Languages contain information about the histories and interactions of people and hold information about the way the brain works.
For example, Noam Chomsky, whom many of you will know from his political work, suggested about 50 years ago that the human brain is intrinsically wired for language. This suggested looking at the various different languages in the world to see if there are any features common to all of them, which would suggest something common to all brains.
But this idea is not panning out. Instead, it seems that languages have enormous flexibility in structure, which had not been anticipated. Some languages have structures that are very strange to an English speaker. Spanish, for example, makes all objects either masculine or feminine in a way that is only rarely used in English (as in, for example, ''She's a fine ship."). Russian speakers have no simple way to say ''the apple" as distinct from ''an apple," yet Russians seem to function fine.
Some of the Native American languages are structured so that when one makes a statement, one also has to say how one knows that the statement is true. In other words, you say things a little differently depending on whether you're talking about something you saw yourself or are relaying a story from someone else. In fact, there are as many as 18 fine gradations in expressing why one believes a statement to be true when one makes it. (I can imagine this would be of interest in the legal system.)
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
