language is the dress of thought - Samuel Johnson # 4 - These slice of life videos of The Book of 25 - are to open the topics for the chapters - and to illustrate - the reality of language development - Language is the dress of thought, is the famous statement of Samuel Johnson Around 200 artificial languages have been created since the 17th century. The first were invented by scholars for communication among philosophers. Later ones were developed by less scholarly men for trade, commerce and international communication. They include Interlingua (a mixture of Latin and Romance with Chinese-like sentence structure), Ido, Tutonish (a simplified blend of Anglo-Saxon English and German) and the more commonly-known Esperanto, invented by Ludwig Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist from Poland, in 1887. It’s estimated that up to 7,000 different languages are spoken around the world. 90% of these languages are used by less than 100,000 people. Over a million people converse in 150-200 languages and 46 languages have just a single speaker! Languages are grouped into families that share a common ancestry. For example, English is related to German and Dutch, and they are all part of the Indo-European family of languages. These also include Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Italian, which come from Latin. 2,200 of the world’s languages can be found in Asia, while Europe has a mere 260. Nearly every language uses a similar grammatical structure, even though they may not be linked in vocabulary or origin. Communities which are usually isolated from each other because of mountainous geography may have developed multiple languages. Papua New Guinea for instance, boasts no less than 832 different languages! The worlds most widely spoken languages by number of native speakers and as a second language, according to figures from UNESCO (The United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French. Globalisation and cultural homogenisation mean that many of the world’s languages are in danger of vanishing. UNESCO has identified 2,500 languages which it claims are at risk of extinction. One quarter of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people and if these are not passed down to the next generation, they will be gone forever. Esperanto is a spoken and written blend of Latin, English, German and Romance elements and literally means one who hopes. Today, Esperanto is widely spoken by approximately 2 million people across the world. bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11304255 In September 2010, delegates at the Trinity College Carmarthen conference in Wales focused on how to stop endangered languages becoming extinct. Nine different languages are used in this clip to explain the current crisis, including Irish Gaelic, Maori, Berber, Guernesiais, Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Manx. It’s great to see this. Altaic (/ælˈteɪɨk/, /ɑːl-/) is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages.[1] These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe (Turks, Kalmyks).[2] The group is named after the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in Central Asia. These language families share numerous characteristics. The debate is over the origin of their similarities. One camp, often called the Altaicists, views these similarities as arising from common descent from a proto-Altaic language spoken several thousand years ago. The other camp, often called the anti-Altaicists, views these similarities as arising from a real interaction between the language groups concerned. Some linguists believe the case for either interpretation is about equally strong. Another view accepts Altaic as a valid family but includes in it only Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. This view was widespread prior to the 1960s, but has almost no supporters among specialists today[.The expanded grouping, including Korean and Japanese, came to be known as Macro-Altaic, leading to the designation of the smaller grouping as Micro-Altaic by retronymy. Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean and Japanese. Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages,to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages for a total of about 74. (These are estimates, depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect. They do not include earlier states of language, such as Middle Mongol or Old Japanese.) Micro-Altaic has a total of about 348 million speakers today, Macro-Altaic about 558 million Birth of the Altaic theory The term Altaic, as the name for a language family, was introduced in 1844 by Matthias Castrén, a pioneering Finnish philologist who made major contributions to the study of the Uralic languages. As originally formulated by Castrén, Altaic included not only Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (=Tungusic) but also Finno-Ugric and Samoyed Finno-Ugric and Samoyed are not included in later formulations of Altaic. They cameto be grouped in a separate family, known as Uralic (though doubts long persisted about its validity). Castréns Altaic is thus equivalent to what later[] came to be known as Ural–Altaic. More precisely, Ural–Altaic came to subgroup Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic as Uralic and Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic as Altaic, with Korean sometimes added to Altaic, and less often Japanese In bidirectional scripts, text is written from right to left while embedded numbers or segments of text in western scripts (such as English or French, Cyrillic-based, or Greek) are written from left to right. Bidirectional scripts are used in languages spoken by more than half a billion people in the Middle East, Central and South Asia and in Africa. Bidirectional languages include Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Azerbaijani, Urdu, Punjabi (in Pakistan), Pushto, Dari, Uigur, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Typical complex-text languages are those with a bidirectional script. Usually they are written from right to left, with some portions of text, such as numbers and embedded Latin-based text, written from left to right. Bidirectional languages include the languages of the Middle East and Africa (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Farsi, Yiddish, and so on). Other complex-text languages include some languages of Asia that do not limit their encoding to a double-byte scheme (Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Korean, and so on). There is nothing in these languages themselves that is more complex than in the Latin-based languages; they are special only in that the presented text does not necessarily look identical to the text as stored. youtube/watch?v=PgEmSb0cKBg youtube/watch?v=RnOZPTaaiaI Harmonic languages ..the evolution of Sound ..or song ? youtube/watch?v=yKLxFmnYO_I
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 20:05:58 +0000
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