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Language / 7,000 voices

An atlas of the human capacity to mean — its sounds, its scripts, its families, its futures.

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An atlas of the human capacity to mean — its sounds, its scripts, its families, its futures. Key sections include: Language / 7,000 voices; A creature that talks; A few trunks , a thousand branches; From a single tongue , half the world; The phoneme & its variations; From picture to letter; The shapes of writing; Who eats whom , in what order; What every language shares; How English became English.

Key sections

  • 01Language / 7,000 voices
  • 02A creature that talks
  • 03A few trunks , a thousand branches
  • 04From a single tongue , half the world
  • 05The phoneme & its variations
  • 06From picture to letter
  • 07The shapes of writing
  • 08Who eats whom , in what order
  • 09What every language shares
  • 10How English became English
  • 11One dies every two weeks
  • 12Translation, preservation , & the rise of English
  • 13Sources & rabbit holes

Topics covered

catalogculturelanguage

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Slide outline
  1. 01Language / 7,000 voices
  2. 02A creature that talks
  3. 03A few trunks , a thousand branches
  4. 04From a single tongue , half the world
  5. 05The phoneme & its variations
  6. 06From picture to letter
  7. 07The shapes of writing
  8. 08Who eats whom , in what order
  9. 09What every language shares
  10. 10How English became English
  11. 11One dies every two weeks
  12. 12Translation, preservation , & the rise of English
  13. 13Sources & rabbit holes
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2026-05-17
LLM text
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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

Language / 7,000 voices

  • A field guide · folio I · 13 leaves
  • An atlas of the human capacity to mean — its sounds, its scripts, its families, its futures.
  • ↳ press → or click to begin
  • I / XIII
Slide 02

I. The species

  • A creature that talks
  • Somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans began to speak in a way no other animal does — recursively, displacedly, infinitely.
  • The lowered larynx, fine motor control of the tongue, and a rewired brain are part of the equipment. So is FOXP2 — a gene whose human variant differs from the chimpanzee version by just two amino acids, but which catastrophically disrupts speech and grammar when mutated.
  • Language is not one organ. It is a conspiracy of organs recruited for a new task.
  • FOXP2 · forkhead box P2
  • Human: ...N...S...
  • Chimp: ...T...N...
  • Two substitutions. A KE-family pedigree in London with a disrupted FOXP2 gave linguistics its first clear genetic anchor on the faculty of language (Lai et al., 2001).
  • Estimates
  • ~7,000
  • living languages today
  • II / XIII
Slide 03

II. The big families

  • A few trunks, a thousand branches
  • Most of the world's speakers belong to a small handful of language families. Most of the world's languages belong to families you have probably never heard of.
  • Indo-European
  • English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, Persian, Greek
  • ~3.2 B
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, Burmese
  • ~1.4 B
  • Niger-Congo
  • Swahili, Yoruba, Zulu, Igbo (~1,500 langs)
  • ~700 M
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa
  • ~600 M
  • Austronesian
  • Malay, Tagalog, Javanese, Maori, Hawaiian
  • ~400 M
  • Dravidian
  • Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam
  • ~250 M
  • Turkic · Japonic · Koreanic · Uralic · ...
  • and isolates: Basque, Korean*, Ainu, Burushaski
  • + ~140 more
  • III / XIII
Slide 04

III. Indo-European

  • From a single tongue, half the world
  • Around 5,000 BC on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a small population spoke what philologists reconstruct as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Their words for "wheel," "horse," "yoke," and "to drive" survive everywhere their descendants rode.
  • PIE *ph₂tḗr →
  • Latin pater · Greek πατήρ
  • Sanskrit पितृ pitṛ́ · German Vater
  • English father · Persian پدر pedar
  • ~3 B
  • speakers descend from PIE today
  • IV / XIII
Slide 05

IV. Sound

  • The phoneme & its variations
  • A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another. English has about 44. Rotokas (Papua New Guinea) has 11. !Xóõ (southern Africa) has more than 160.
  • The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) gives every speech sound a unique symbol — read in monospace, like coordinates.
  • [p]plosive
  • [θ]think
  • [ʃ]shoe
  • [ŋ]sing
  • [ɹ]red
  • [ʔ]uh-oh
  • [ǂ]palatal click
  • [ɮ]lateral fric.
  • Clicks · Khoisan
  • The !Xóõ language uses clicks as full consonants:
  • ǀ ǃ ǂ ǁ
  • dental · alveolar · palatal · lateral
  • Tone · Mandarin
  • The syllable ma means four different things depending on pitch contour:
  • mā 媽 — mother
  • má 麻 — hemp
  • mǎ 馬 — horse
  • mà 罵 — to scold
  • V / XIII
Slide 06

V. Writing

  • From picture to letter
  • Writing is roughly 5,400 years old — a baby compared with speech. It evolved, more than once, through a sequence of compressions.
  • Stage 1 · Pictographs
  • 𓃭 𓅓 ☼
  • A picture is the thing. Sumerian proto-cuneiform, Egyptian early hieroglyphs, oracle bones.
  • Stage 2 · Ideographs
  • 山 木 安
  • A sign for an idea, not a word. Mostly a myth in pure form — Han characters mix logograms, phonetic hints, and radicals.
  • Stage 3 · Syllabaries
  • か き く
  • One sign = one syllable. Japanese kana, Cherokee, Linear B. Compact for some phonologies, awkward for others.
  • Stage 4 · Abjads
  • ا ب ت
  • Consonants only — vowels inferred. Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic. Compact, but reading aloud requires the language already known.
  • Stage 5 · Abugidas
  • क का कि
  • Consonant base + vowel diacritic. The Brahmic family — Devanagari, Tamil, Thai, Tibetan.
  • Stage 6 · Alphabets
  • A B Γ Я
  • Independent letters for vowels and consonants. A Greek innovation, c. 800 BC. Cheap to learn, easy to print.
  • VI / XIII
Slide 07

VI. Script samples

  • The shapes of writing
  • Α α
  • Greek
  • ~800 BC · 24 letters
  • Я Д
  • Cyrillic
  • ~9th c · 33 letters
  • ا ب ت
  • Arabic
  • ~4th c · abjad · RTL
  • अ आ क
  • Devanagari
  • ~7th c · abugida
  • 字 文 言
  • Han / 漢字
  • ~1200 BC · ~50,000 chars
  • 한 글
  • Hangul
  • 1443 · featural alphabet
  • Hangul, invented under King Sejong, is unique: its letter shapes literally diagram the position of the tongue and lips. A linguistic instrument disguised as an alphabet.
  • VII / XIII
Slide 08

VII. Grammar

  • Who eats whom, in what order
  • If a sentence has a subject, an object, and a verb, there are six possible orderings — but only two of them dominate the world's languages.
  • SOV
  • The cat the mouse eats. — Japanese, Turkish, Hindi, Korean, Latin
  • ~45%
  • SVO
  • The cat eats the mouse. — English, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian
  • ~42%
  • VSO
  • Eats the cat the mouse. — Irish, Welsh, Classical Arabic, Hawaiian
  • ~9%
  • VOS
  • Eats the mouse the cat. — Malagasy, Fijian
  • ~3%
  • OVS
  • The mouse eats the cat. — Hixkaryana (Carib)
  • <1%
  • OSV
  • The mouse the cat eats. — Warao (rare); Yoda
  • <1%
  • Free word order
  • Some languages — Latin, Russian, Finnish — let you reorder words almost arbitrarily, because case endings on the nouns mark who's doing what to whom.
  • fēlēs mūrem edit.
  • mūrem fēlēs edit.
  • edit fēlēs mūrem.
  • All three: the cat eats the mouse.
  • "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
  • — Wittgenstein, Tractatus 5.6
  • VIII / XIII
Slide 09

VIII. Universals & parameters

  • What every language shares
  • Joseph Greenberg (1963) drew up 45 statistical universals from a sample of 30 languages — observations like:
  • If a language has prepositions, it tends to have noun-before-genitive order.
  • Almost every language distinguishes nouns from verbs.
  • Vowel inventories cluster: most have /i a u/.
  • Noam Chomsky went further. Beneath surface variation, all languages share a universal grammar — a finite set of parameters (head-first vs head-last, pro-drop on/off) that the child sets by listening.
  • Linguistic typology is the field that maps the joint distribution of these settings across the world.
  • IX / XIII
Slide 10

IX. Change

  • How English became English
  • Grimm's Law · ~500 BC
  • A regular sound shift that moved Proto-Indo-European stops in Germanic:
  • *p → f *t → þ *k → h
  • *b → p *d → t *g → k
  • PIE *pater → Old English fæder. PIE *tréyes → English three. PIE *kerd- → English heart.
  • The Great Vowel Shift · 1400–1700
  • Across three centuries, English long vowels rotated upward and split. Spelling, frozen by the printing press, did not move with them.
  • bite [biːtə] → [baɪt]
  • meet [meːt] → [miːt]
  • house [huːs] → [haʊs]
  • name [naːmə] → [neɪm]
  • This is why English spelling looks like a war crime against phonetics.
  • Language change is inevitable, regular, and faster than you think. The English of 1400 is, to a modern reader, nearly a foreign tongue. The English of 800 — Beowulf — is one.
  • X / XIII
Slide 11

X. Endangered

  • One dies every two weeks
  • ~40%
  • of all languages are endangered
  • ~1 / 14d
  • rate of language extinction (UNESCO est.)
  • ~96%
  • of speakers use just 4% of languages
  • Most of the world's linguistic diversity sits on a long, thin tail: thousands of languages, each with a few hundred or a few thousand speakers, mostly transmitted orally, mostly without economic incentive for younger speakers to keep them.
  • When a language disappears, what disappears with it is hard to enumerate: a botanical taxonomy, a system of kinship terms, a way of pointing at time, a body of stories, a grammar of feeling.
  • Recently extinct (last fluent speaker):
  • Eyak (Alaska, 2008) · Klallam-S'klallam (2014) ·
  • Wukchumni (critical) · Livonian (Latvia, 2013) · ...
  • XI / XIII
Slide 12

XI. The future

  • Translation, preservation, & the rise of English
  • Three forces are reshaping the linguistic map:
  • Machine translation — neural models now cover 200+ languages well, and another ~1,000 passably. The translator's friction approaches zero for the majority of speakers.
  • Preservation — recording, transcribing, training models on small languages while fluent elders are alive. Living Tongues, ELAR, The Endangered Languages Project.
  • English's rise — ~1.5 B speakers (most of them L2). The default language of science, aviation, and the internet.
  • Whether the future is one tongue or many depends on choices made now.
  • XII / XIII
Slide 13

XII. Further reading

  • Sources & rabbit holes
  • Books
  • The Power of Babel — John McWhorter
  • The Unfolding of Language — Guy Deutscher
  • Through the Language Glass — Guy Deutscher
  • The Horse, the Wheel, and Language — David Anthony
  • Empires of the Word — Nicholas Ostler
  • Language Files — Ohio State University
  • Tools
  • WALS · World Atlas of Language Structures
  • Glottolog · genealogical reference
  • Ethnologue · speaker counts
  • PHOIBLE · phoneme inventories
  • YouTube
  • Langfocus · Indo-European deep dives
  • IPA phonetics chart explained
  • "A different language is a different vision of life."
  • — Federico Fellini
  • — end of folio I —
  • Compiled MMXXVI · cream paper, dark ink, deep teal, burgundy.
  • XIII / XIII
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