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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 18 2017, @12:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-Enough-Babel-Fish dept.

People don't speak one universal language, or even a handful. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7,000 distinct languages.

And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet. For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the 250,000 people who live on Vanuatu's 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages.

Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.

[...] Language diversity has played a key role in shaping the interactions of human groups and the history of our species, and yet we know surprisingly little about the factors shaping this diversity. We hope other scientists will become as fascinated by the geography of language diversity as our research group is and join us in the search for understanding why humans speak so many languages.

https://theconversation.com/why-do-human-beings-speak-so-many-languages-75434

Would you people care to speculate as to why there are so many languages ?


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @01:30AM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @01:30AM (#540681)

    I'll consider to your message again when the US populace will learn how to spell aluminium.

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:11AM (10 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:11AM (#540731)

    His message is obviously a joke, since English is the #1 most-spoken language in the world (just not as a first language), and is the de-facto lingua franca for business and international relations. You can find random people just about everywhere who can speak a bit of English, albeit poorly, but enough to establish basic communication.

    But for aluminum, the US has it right. If you disagree, then you need to explain why you don't try to stick a "-ium" on the end of: plumbum, cuprum, lanthanum, aurum, molybdenum, tantalum, platinum, and a bunch more. The first person to isolate it, the British scientist Humphrey Davy, first called it "alumium", but settled on "aluminum" in 1812. It was some other moron named Thomas Young who pushed "aluminium", even though he was just a stupid book reviewer, not the scientist to actually break new ground with the material like Davy. Webster's Dictionary of 1828 used the -um spelling, so that's what we've been using ever since, rather than switching to something that some do-nothing loser (who wrote his review of Davy's book anonymously) decided he liked better. Why you guys insist on that, I have no idea. As I pointed out above, there's plenty of other elements that match the "-um" style, including elements which were isolated and named around the same time, not just ones named by the Romans.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:38AM (2 children)

      by Arik (4543) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:38AM (#540780) Journal
      Davy did settle on 'aluminum' but it doesn't seem out of line to suppose a typo from a man who had also recently isolated potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and strontium. Thomas Young was hardly an idiot, and he had a good point - granted that you can use either -ium or -um with the same meaning, the one with the more classical sound can hardly be the worst choice. There are some words where you use -um but they're the minority. Words with odd numbers of syllables work better, so platinum and lanthanum with 3 syllables each make sense, but aluminum with 4 is awkward enough that adding another syllable results in a word that rolls of the tongue more quickly.

      Also Webster was a jackass.

      But Brit English is far from perfect, if you want to tear them apart you should examine their use of grammatical number, it's gotten horribly confused over the last century or so.

      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:13PM (1 child)

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:13PM (#541026) Journal

        granted that you can use either -ium or -um with the same meaning, the one with the more classical sound can hardly be the worst choice.

        Neither -um nor -ium has a "more classical sound"; both endings are common. The difference lies in the classical root words that were used to form the element names. E.g., (to use some of your examples) strontium comes from Strontian, a village in Scotland that has an 'i'; magnesium comes from Greek "Magnesia" (with an 'i') which was a Greek district that eventually gave its name to magnetic rocks and other minerals in the Renaissance, calcium comes from Latin calx, calcis ("chalk"), from a third declension i-stem noun in Latin (yes, they are called "i-stems" because they have 'i' appear prominently in suffixes), etc., etc.

        The last few elements to have been isolated at the time aluminum was had just been derived from classical words that had an 'i' in the suffix. "Alum" and "alumina," the two relevant words for the base of the new element, had no 'i'. (Well, the latter has an 'i', which led to an early form "alumium," that never caught on.) So, there's really not etymological reason to stuff an 'i' in aluminIum.

        All the arguments about number of syllables or which "sounds more classical" are nonsense -- these words were simply derived from classical roots. And the previous few elements had an 'i', so people took to shoving an 'i' in aluminium. It's really that simple. It's hardly the first or last time that people took to shoving unnecessary letters into words -- at least this letter is pronounced, unlike, say, "island" which used to be spelled (logically) "iland" in English but stupid Latinate idiots shoved an 's' into the spelling because they thought (incorrectly) that it was derived from Latin "insula" (which means "island") or "debt" which used to be spelled as French "dette" and sometimes English "det" or "dett" until some idiot thought to emphasize the ultimate Latin root debitum and shoved a silent 'b' into the spelling.

        English spelling is a disaster. Trying to assume there's some logic to it is just pointless. But in this case, the American spelling does have a slightly better etymological claim given how the word was coined.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @08:16PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @08:16PM (#541626)

          Another example of the Latin snobs adding a letter is the first "c" in "arctic". Unlike the other examples, there are now a huge number of people pronouncing that "c", and even having the gall to think they are superior to those of us taught that the first "c" is supposed to be silent.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:20AM (#540820)

      To be fair, most of those names that you list are ones that were lifted from Latin and as such, those have mostly always been spelled that way, at least as far as western knowledge of them goes. Most of them either being discovered by the Romans or just the records of them being in Latin.

    • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:34PM (5 children)

      by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:34PM (#540975) Homepage Journal

      We in the US spell Tyre wrong, because the pneumatic tyre was invented in Scotland (Wikipedia says it was spelled "tire" until the turn of the 20th century, short for "attire"). Lift makes far more sense than elevator, why use a four syllable word when there's a one syllable synonym?

      But I can't figure out why they call a car's trunk a "boot". Wagons had trunks for tools and so forth before cars, or even the US, were invented. Why "boot"?

      --
      mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:31PM (3 children)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:31PM (#541003)

        I looked up Wikipedia's "elevator" article and couldn't find anything on the history of the difference in terminology (elevator vs. lift), but just going by what you said with tire vs. tyre and aluminum vs aluminium, it sure seems like the British have a nasty habit of trying to change words after they've already been adopted, and then getting mad when the Americans don't follow along.

        Of course, this isn't true for all such differences. I just looked up color vs. colour, and it seems the version with the 'u' is older, but around 1840 Americans used the simplified version more often. This is probably the case with many other such words with extra letters: Americans prefer simpler spellings, for what I hope are obvious reasons. What does that 'u' need to be there for anyway? It isn't pronounced and doesn't add anything to the word.

        The one thing that really annoys me about British English, however, is the use of plural forms when talking about groups (e.g., "Comcast are a cable company" instead of "Comcast is a cable company"). Do they do the same dumb thing with country names (i.e., "The UK are an economically failing nation")?

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:40PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:40PM (#541049)

          Maths

          That is the nails on the chalkboard for me. Its a collective singular word, so shortening it with an unnecessary s is silly.

        • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 19 2017, @02:49PM (1 child)

          by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Wednesday July 19 2017, @02:49PM (#541441) Homepage Journal

          Very strongly agree with your opinion of "Microsoft are". Microsoft IS, the people of Microsoft ARE. Cars are made of thousands of discrete parts, so why don't they say "My car are out of petrol"?

          As to the U, I'd guess that at one point in the language's evolution it was pronounced. Many English words are also spelled funny (knife, laugh, cough, through) because English is a bastard language that borrowed from other European languages.

          --
          mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
          • (Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 19 2017, @05:18PM

            by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday July 19 2017, @05:18PM (#541520)

            Microsoft IS, the people of Microsoft ARE. Cars are made of thousands of discrete parts, so why don't they say "My car are out of petrol"?

            Exactly. Furthermore, do Brits use singular or plural for the word "group"? i.e., "The group is going there" vs. "The group are going there". I'm not sure, but the latter sure sounds goofy, and makes no sense. Every physical object, every thing really, is composed of smaller subcomponents. A car is made of thousands of parts, but even a single piece of steel is composed of countless atoms. A single atom is composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. A subatomic particle like that is composed of quarks. Quarks are probably composed of smaller things. So when do you get to use singular forms? The whole thing is just plain stupid. I'm honestly flabbergasted that British English took this turn, and I actually don't know when it happened because I've known about their odd spellings for most of my life, but this feature I only learned about in the last few years so I really wonder if it's a new thing. To borrow some good parts of British English, it's bloody stupid and it's bollocks.

            Many English words are also spelled funny (knife, laugh, cough, through) because English is a bastard language that borrowed from other European languages.

            There's more to it than that. There's this thing called the Great Vowel Shift [wikipedia.org] that happened where they changed the way they pronounced all the vowels. Other European languages had similar shifts and changed their spellings to suit the new pronunciations when they had their vowel shifts, but English didn't for many words, so we have words with spellings that fit the older pronunciation.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:04PM (#541215)

        Because the other end of the car has a bonnet, silly.
        http://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=bonnet+hood+boot+caravan+car.park [google.com]

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:25AM (#540776)

    The proper spelling of that has always been aluminum going back to the early 19th century when it was first being isolated. There was a period of about 3 years where the aluminium spelling was prefered by IUPAC before they formally accepted the more correct aluminum spelling.

    Claiming that the proper spelling involves that extra i is rather silly and not supported by the facts. It's been the official spelling of aluminum since the early 19th century and aluminium being the standard lasted about 3 years before the problem was resolved.