Sunday, January 20, 2008

language dreams and aspirations

So I was looking at wikipedia's "languages by number of speakers". Some notes:

The best information about how many languages there are, and how many people speak them, apparently comes from Christians. Why? They're interested in getting the Bible to all these people in their "heart language" (which is to say the language they most comfortably think in) (there's probably a more technical definition of "heart language" somewhere, but that's my understanding of it). Which includes writing it down, if it's not written down yet, and teaching the people to read it. So in one sense Christians are the primary promoters of literacy on the planet. I find that fascinating. *Why* do they care so much about the Bible? I think I rather take for granted my access to and knowledge of the Bible. I can hardly stand to read it any more. It's intriguing to me that America is at some level one of the most ... bible saturated countries on the face of the planet, and also one of the most horrifically violence saturated countries on the face of the planet. I'm mostly talking about our export of violence. In fact, I would be curious to see a graph looking at a correlation between number of bibles in print and gross amount of money spent on weapons in a long list of nations. I'm willing to bet there would actually be a strong correlation (although of course this doesn't necessarily show causality).

I've got a reasonable grasp on English, and decent start on Spanish. Those are languages number 2 and 3, not necessarily in that order, with 600 to 800 million speakers. And now I'm just barely beginning Arabic, which is somewhere in the top 4 most spoken languages, with somewhere between 200 and 400 million speakers. With those three, I can communicate with something like a billion people in their first language, and well over two billion if you count everyone who speaks one of these three as a second language.

I suppose after that, the thing to do would be to attempt Mandarin, the most spoken first language on the planet, with nearly a billion native speakers. But my sense is that it's even harder than Arabic. My Middle Eastern studies professor says even once you learn modern standard Arabic, you're going to have to learn a whole new ... iteration of it 30 something times over if you want to speak to all the different Arabic speakers. That could be daunting, I suppose, but if one doesn't even step out the front door, one will never get to any destination at all.

1 comment:

byron smith said...

I would be curious to see a graph looking at a correlation between number of bibles in print and gross amount of money spent on weapons in a long list of nations. I'm willing to bet there would actually be a strong correlation (although of course this doesn't necessarily show causality).

You may well be right, but I doubt any simle causation could be easily proved, as I suspect that a gross measure of money spent on weapons would more or less follow total GDP, which in turn, is likely to also correlate with total books in print, and then with Bibles in print. Thus, nations with higher populations and more developed economies are likely to have more of everything, including Bibles and weapons. Perhaps more interesting would be to look at proportional spending on weapons correlated with Bibles per capita. I'm not so sure the correlation would be as strong, though would not make any causal claim about this.