Fun fact: I was a graduate linguistics student for one year. When I got married and moved away from my university, I thought I would just finish up somewhere else, but it turns out graduate linguistics programs are not thick on the ground, and then life happened, and what with one thing and another, I mainly used my training to study my children's language acquisition. But you would think that with this history, I would be superstoked about the 400s, especially since my undergrad was in French, I sort of speak Spanish, and I currently make a living teaching English, among other things.
You would think.
But I've been having a hard time getting into this chunk of the library. I mean...
400: Overview of language
410: Linguistics (which is different from the overview of language how?)
420: English
430: German
440: French
450: Italian
460: Spanish
470: Latin
480: Greek (ancient and modern, in case you were wondering)
490: Other languages (you know, Swahili, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, etc. 10 numbers should be plenty for them, apparently?)
And all I can think is, "Oh, glory, I have to read an entire book about German? And then another one about Italian? Ugh." The good news is that in the 420s I get to read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which I have never read before, which is just plain ridiculous given that, as previously mentioned, I teach people where to put commas for a living.
Anyway, even my little local library agrees about the superfluity of 400-409. There were literally no books numbered as such in the adult section, which is how I ended up reading a kids' book called Chitchat, by Jude Isabella and Kathy Boake.
More fun facts I learned from the brightly illustrated pages of this book for middle grade readers, and then verified for you through minutes of painstaking research:
- Ancient languages had no name for blue, and neither do a few living languages. People speaking such languages perceive blues as shades of green or black. Thus, perhaps, Homer's "wine-dark sea." (Or maybe he just figured you already knew what color the sea was. We don't actually have a clue.) People who grow up with a different set of color words think of the whole color spectrum differently. I don't think I can ever unsee ROYGBIV, but I love that some cultures use the same word for "black"and for all dark colors. When I went back to school for Art, I learned in Painting 1 that there's no such thing as pure black (or white, for that matter), and we were made to mix all our "blacks" from colors. So we could learn to "unsee" something our language had taught us. Maybe with a few more years of training, I could unsee the distinction between green and blue?
- There is a group called "The Long Now Foundation" that has etched 1500 human languages on one palm-sized disk. This Rosetta Project is named after the famous Rosetta Stone that, by carving the same text in three languages, unlocked Egyptian heiroglyphics to the modern world. So, that's pretty cool. Only you need a microscope to read the carvings, so I hope the people 2000 years from now who find this thing will have one. Also, I hope they can find it, since it's so small. The foundation seems to have considered some of these issues, and they are certainly right that digital records are quite undependable in the long run.
- Hildegard Bingen, that turn of the (12th) century polymath, invented an alphabet and language, possibly as a result of divine revelation. (She also wrote music and medical texts.) In the present day, making up languages is a whole thing, whether to lend verisimilitude to a fictional narrative like The Lord of the Rings or Star Trek, or to bring about world peace, as Esperanto was meant to do.
- Akbar the Great once conducted an experiment wherein a large group of children were brought up in one building with nurses who could not speak. The idea may have been to see whether they developed any kind of speech, and, if so, what known language it resembled, but the actual result was that they only made noises-- and may or may not have used sign language, which they may or may not have learned from the nurses. There's much uncertainty about the nature and outcome of this experiment, since it took place so long ago, but what is known is that communities with large numbers of deaf inhabitants typically work out sign languages that are adopted by even the hearing members of the community. Chitchat references the Al Sayyid Bedouin community, which is particularly exciting to linguists because the whole process of language development has taken place within recent history and is continuing as we speak. Similar processes produced a local sign language on Martha's Vineyard which has since died out, and in Nicaragua, where the language is still developing.
