Do you know why most languages call mother "mama"?
Do you know why Africans are linguistic geniuses?
Do you know how Indonesia allows more than 700 languages to live in peace?
These three life-threatening questions make everyone feel confused? In fact, this is related to the book I want to introduce to you today.
This is a short history of human language that satisfies everyone's curiosity about language through the 20 languages spoken by the most people in the world- "The Story of Human Language".
Why do most languages call mother "mama"?
First, let's take a look at the several languages listed on the cover. Among them, French, English, Chinese, Spanish and Russian, although they are very different from each other, the pronunciation of "mother" is surprisingly consistent.
Perhaps this is because the first sound almost all children make is "mama". Therefore, most languages invariably use this pronunciation to represent the meaning of "mother".
But in fact, the sound that the child makes at this time is the "ma" sound made by the baby when he breathes out and sucks breast milk.
"Mom" at this time is not "mother" in the true sense, but just a symbol of milk and warmth.
is very discoverable?
This book mainly introduces the 20 languages spoken by the most people in the world, and each language has a lot of interesting knowledge.
For example, we all think that the languages of European countries are very similar, so it is easier for a European to master multiple languages.
But in fact, judging from the number of languages spoken per capita,African talents are proper language geniuses!
In Africa, the average person speaks 3 languages: mother tongue, lingua franca and "significant language".
On the one hand, Africa is one of the few multilingual societies in the world. They speak multiple languages because society uses multiple languages.
On the other hand, they know that their mother tongue cannot take them too far socially and geographically, so if they want to achieve better development, they are required to speak other languages as well.
Therefore, is not so much that Africans are good at learning languages, it is better to say that they have a wise and pragmatic attitude towards communication.
Author Gaston Dolen is a real multilingual person. He can read 11 languages including Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Norwegian and Esperanto .
To write this book, he also spent several years learning Vietnamese , the 20th most used language in the world.
Although he studied very hard, he still had to admit that he had suffered a terrible defeat in Vietnamese.
He asked the teacher: "Can you think of a reason for me to continue learning?"
And the teacher told him: "As long as you learn Vietnamese, it will be easier to learn Chinese."
A comforting statement? The editor couldn't help laughing.
As the translator of this book said:
There are many novel perspectives in this book, which we have never thought of as our mother tongue, one of the major languages in the world.
For example, although our country and Vietnam are very close neighbors, we may never want to learn Vietnamese.
We, who realized " with the same text " thousands of years ago, may never have imagined that the people of Tamil have fought hard for decades and even gave their lives for the legal status of their language...
passed In this book, we not only learned about the historical and cultural knowledge of 20 languages, the author also shared his language learning experience with us in the book:
He is good at foreign languages, all of which he has to use and have A foreign language that has enough time to practice. From this point of view, investing time is the most difficult aspect of language learning.
In order to help everyone better understand, this book is also carefully matched with 66 illustrations, which is a great choice for language lovers!
Which languages have entered the ranks of the top 20 languages in the world? What is the thrilling story behind them? Is it difficult to learn these languages?
……
Open this brief history of the language, which will definitely satisfy all your curiosity about human language.
Message interaction
What other interesting stories do you know about language?
Welcome to share in the message area
Top 6 messages readers
can get a free book
— THE END —
.-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-