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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 ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:07AM (5 children)
A little test: Translate for us
"Visit the Duke"
"Trouble and strife"
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:14AM (4 children)
Neither of these are phrases I'd ever use myself, but I recognise “Trouble and Strife” as being Cockney slang for “wife”, but “Visit the Duke” is new to me. I have an idge that it's bathroom related, and if it's rhyming slang again then I'll plump for “puke” (vomit). Do I get a prize?
On the topic of speaking Great Britain, I count at least five indigenous languages other than English in the UK.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday July 18 2017, @07:58AM (1 child)
I think visiting the duke means going to your landlord to pay rent.
It seems most of these phrases are extremely regional terms that were used by small groups of teenagers and young adults that ended up being picked up and circulated by clueless script writers that wanted to sound young and relatable to the middle\lower classes back in the early days of popular theater and television.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:26AM
That's probably where Shakespeare got a lot of his "new" words from.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @10:03AM (1 child)
Indeed.
“Visit the Duke” is new to me.
I'm reminded of the ST:TNG episode where the civilization spoke in metaphors and, if you didn't know the context, you would never figure out WTF they were talking about.
Steve Jones, formerly of The Sex Pistols, has a show on an L.A. radio station where he uses the phrase to mean it's time for a commercial.
RamiK got it right.
(The whole thing is "visit the Duke of Kent".)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:28AM
Same if the alien has a different sort of colour vision trying to explain the different stuff it sees to us. We'll have no words for the subtle shades of infra-red and the wonderful sensation they get when it's mixed with UV-B.
Or trying to explain to a dog what we really want it to detect.
Human: "Here doggie, bark when you smell this sort of urine and not this sort of urine"
Dog: uh what do you want me to tell you about?
"Early stage bladder cancer?"
"Ovulating?"
"Had beef for lunch?"
etc
or some combination of the possibilities e.g. ovulating AND had wine.
So the training process is partly for the dog to figure out what the heck we want the dog to smell from the zillions of detectable combinations.