by Curt Kovener
Language and speech are two matters which differentiate us from non-communicating species…or at least from it is intended to.
But maybe there were some things we didn’t learn in high school English, speech & science classes.
•The voice box sits lower in the throat in humans than it does in other primates, giving us a uniquely large resonating system. That’s why we alone are able to make the wide range of sounds needed for speech. Which also may explain Mariah Carey, Barry White, and Frankie Vallee.
•Unfortunately, the placement of our voice box means we can’t breathe and swallow at the same time, as other animals can. If we do, we choke. On the other hand, fortunately, the human voice box doesn’t drop until about 9 months of age, which allows infants to breathe while nursing at their momma’s breast.
•Mandarin (a Chinese dialect) is the long-standing champ among world languages with 845 million native speakers, about 2.5 times as many as English.
•But more than 70% of all the home pages on the Internet are in English, and more online users speak English than any other language, making it the world’s lingua franca (assuming you consider OMG, LOL, and WTF English).
•Maybe they are on to something…English is mandatory for every student in China, starting in third grade. But in America, only 3 percent of elementary schools and 4 percent of secondary schools even offer Chinese.
•Many science-related English words starting with the letters al-including algebra, alkaline, and algorithm-are derived from Arabic, in which the prefix al just means “the.” This is a legacy of the medieval era, when ancient Greek and Roman knowledge was largely lost in Europe but preserved and advanced among scholars in the Islamic world.
•Modern technology is making everything smaller, even our words. “Bits of eight” shrank to become byte, “modulate/demodulate” became modem, “picture cell” became pixel, and of course “web log” became blog.
•At the other end of the language spectrum, the longest word recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary is pneumono-ultra-microscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease caused by inhaling volcanic silicon dust. Which, by the way, have you heard about all that volcanic activity in Iceland and Hawaii? Not that we don’t already have enough to worry about.
•Three- to five-day-olds born into French-speaking families tend to cry with the rising intonation characteristic of French; babies with German-speaking parents cry with falling tones, much like spoken German. Infants may start learning language in the womb, it seems.
• In old Westerns, Native Americans often made a sound like “ugh.” This wasn’t a commentary on the plots; it was a naive attempt to reproduce the sound of the glottal stop of many Native American languages, produced by briefly closing the vocal cords during speech.
• Native American Sign Language is the world’s most widespread silent language, with some 2.7 million users.
•Another sound of silence: More than one-third of the world’s 6,800 spoken languages are endangered. About 200 tongues now have fewer than 10 surviving speakers.