# Language / 7,000 voices

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Category: Cuisine
Slides: 13
Updated: 2026-05-17T20:56:01.028Z
Tags: catalog, culture, language

## Summary

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.

## Slide Outline

1. Language / 7,000 voices
2. A creature that talks
3. A few trunks , a thousand branches
4. From a single tongue , half the world
5. The phoneme & its variations
6. From picture to letter
7. The shapes of writing
8. Who eats whom , in what order
9. What every language shares
10. How English became English
11. One dies every two weeks
12. Translation, preservation , & the rise of English
13. Sources & rabbit holes

## Slide Transcript

### Slide 1: 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 2: 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 3: 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 4: 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 5: 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 6: 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 7: 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 8: 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 9: 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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