Word

A word is a unit of spoken or written language.

The English language now contains close to a million words.

The study of word origins is called etymology.

WORDS IN HISTORY

There are 23 words that researchers believe date back 15,000 years, making them the oldest known words. They are: thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm.

The etymology of the word "clue" is from a Greek myth, when Theseus enters the Labyrinth to kill the Minotaur (a half-man, half-bull). He unraveled a "clew" -a ball of string- behind him, so he could find his way out of the labyrinth. "Clew" was mispelled overtime, but kept its symbolic meaning.

Experts think Shakespeare used 17,677 different words.

There are 21,785 words in the English dictionary that first appeared in the 18th century.

The word "dord; was accidentally created, as a ghost word, by the staff of G. and C. Merriam Company (now part of Merriam-Webster) in the 1934 edition of the New International Dictionary. That dictionary defined the term a synonym for density used in physics and chemistry in the following way: "dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Density." On February 28, 1939, an editor discovered the erroneous word "dord" in the Websters New International Dictionary, Second Edition, prompting an investigation. The non-word "dord" was excised.

RECORDS 

The longest word to occur in a literary work has to do with a meat dish cut into pieces served in sauce, with 17 sweet and sour ingredients, including brains, fish, honey vinegar, ouzo and pickles. The word appears in Women at the Ecclesia, a satirical comedy by Aristophanes, an Athenian playwright. In Greek, the word is 170 letters; transliterated into English it is 182 letters. It is: Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon.

The longest real word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is floccinaucinihilipilification, which has 29 letters. The meaning of the word is "the act of estimating as worthless". The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

THE English word with the most meanings is "set". The Oxford English Dictionary"s entry is 60,000 words, or 326,000 characters, long with 430 different senses of the word.

UNUSUAL WORDS 

Queue is the only word in the English language that is still said the same way when the last four letters are removed.

"Omnishambles", coined by the television series The Thick Of It, was named the Word of the Year for 2012.

The word "uncopyrightable" consists entirely of 15 different letters. Along with "dermatoglyphics" (study of fingerprints), it is the longest such word.

At 16 letters long, unprosperousness is the longest word in the English language in which each of its letters occurs at least twice.

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."

The words "racecar" and "kayak" are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.

"Strengths" is the longest English word with only one vowel.

"Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.

The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.

Dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

There are three words in the English language with two "u"s" in consecutive order: vacuum, residuum, and continuum.

The Oxford English Dictionary added "Zyzzyva" as a new last word in 2017. Pronounced "zih-zih-vah", it"s the name of a genus of tropical weevils found in South America. Previously, the last word was "zythum", a beer brewed in ancient Egypt.

"Mamihlapinatapai" is a word spoken in the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, located in an archipelago off the South American mainland. It is listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. The word means "a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to begin."

COMMON WORDS 

The 100 most common words in English account for 50 per cent of all we speak or write.

Among the 100 most used words in English, only "person" and "because" have more than five letters.

"Huh?" is a universal word expressing misunderstanding, found in languages across the globe including: Icelandic, Russian, Spanish, Mandarin, Cha"palaa, Murrinh-Patha, and Lao.

"Ain"t" has been called the most socially stigmatized word in the English language", as well as "the most powerful social marker" in English. "Ain"t" wasn't always a socially acceptable contraction and was used by the educated and the upper-class throughout the 17th to 19th century.

FUN WORD FACTS 

A new English word is created every 98 minutes — about 14 per day, says the Global Language Monitor.

6,000 is the minimum number of words women speak each day, while it"s only 2,000 to 4,000 for men.

In vocabulary development from age six to eight, the average child in school is learning six to seven words per day.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words.

"A-hoy" was a Middle English greeting for "hello" so "Ships, Ahoy" means that you are hailing the ships.

“Goodbye” comes from the 16th century word “Godbwye,” a contraction of the phrase “God be with ye.”

"Second" (after first) is the same word as "second" (a 60th of a minute), because we get a minute from dividing the hour by 60, and then we divide it a second time.

Fossil words are words that have largely fallen out of common use but still survive in idioms. Examples include "lo" as in (lo and behold) and "fro" (as in to and fro).

Lonely negatives are words with common prefixes or suffixes such as "dis-", "in-", "un-", "-less" but without positive counterparts such as the words "disgust", "disappoint", "reckless" - they don't have "gust", "appoint", or "reckful" as their opposites.

An "unpaired word" is a word that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word, but does not. Examples include disgruntled, nonchalant, and ruthless.

A synanagram is a word whose letters can be rearranged to form a different word with the same meaning—like ‘angered’ and ‘enraged’. ‘Twelve plus one’ is an anagram of ‘eleven plus two.’ and both add up to 13!

Words that share a semantic relationship and are grouped in a specific order are called Irreversible Binomials/Trinomials. This can include things like "rank and file, "spick and span," and "lock, stock, and barrel."

Words that change meaning and sometimes pronunciation based on the capitalization of the first letter, like "Polish" vs. "polish" are called Capitonyms.

Samrt poeple can udnretsnad any msseed up stnecene as lnog as the lsat and frsit leterts of the wdros are in crrcoet plaecs.

Translation

Translation means to render a writing or speech from one language into a different language. The word 'translate' comes from the Latin for 'to move from one place to another'.

Translation document. Wikipedia

The first important translation in the West was that of the Septuagint, a collection of Jewish scriptures translated into early Koine Greek in Alexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC. The dispersed Jews who were now speaking Greek had forgotten their ancestral language and needed Greek versions of their Scriptures.

It was called the Septuagint meaning "70" as 70 noted Jewish scholars worked on it.

The translation of the Old Testament into Greek helped spread the idea of monotheism outside the Jewish world.

St Jerome translated the Bible from the original Hebrew text into Latin in the 4th century. Prior to Jerome's Vulgate, all Latin translations of the Old Testament had been based on the Septuagint not the Hebrew. His translation, called The Vulgate, was the official Catholic Bible until the 16th century.

Saint Jerome by the Le Nain brothers, 1642-43

In 998, a brutal Viking army raided the Dorset countryside in southwest England near the rural Cerne (now Cerne Abbas) monastery. Ælfric (c. 955 – c. 1010), a monk at Cerne, responded to this national crisis by creating the first vernacular translation of the first six books of the Old Testament, pastoral letters, and other teaching materials. In his Grammar, Ælfric translated the Latin grammar into English, creating what is considered the first vernacular Latin grammar in medieval Europe.

In 1934 an American translator Cameron Townsend (1896-1982) founded Wycliffe Bible translators with the aim of providing a translation of at least part of the Bible in every language. Some of the languages Wycliffe Bible Translators provided a Bible translation for had previously had no written language and the organization's innovative approach to their mission has inspired a number of simplified English translations such as the Good News Bible.

Image suggesting translation from Chinese to English

The Bible is the most translated book in the world with The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le Avventure di Pinocchio) in second place.

According to Unesco's Index Translationum, the most translated author of fiction is Agatha Christie followed by Jules Verne and William Shakespeare.

The languages most often translated into others are English, French, German, Russian and Italian.

The most common for translation into are German, French, Spanish, English and Japanese.

Winnie Ille Pu, the 1958 Latin translation of AA Milne's children's story Winnie the Pooh, is the only book in Latin ever to appear on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

"Mamihlapinatapai," derived from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego is listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word". It is considered one of the hardest words to translate. "Mamihlapinatapai" means "a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to begin."

In many old Western movies since nobody in charge was able to translate Native languages many Native American extras would ad-lib or make jokes in their own language.

Source Christianitytoday

Symbol

A symbol is a drawing, shape, or object that stands for something else. It may be an aesthetic device, or a sign used to convey information, thus saving time, eliminating language barriers, or overcoming illiteracy. Symbols are used in cartography, for instance, to communicate geographical information.

The three categories of cartographic symbol shapes. By Sfitch

The asterisk derives from the two thousand year old character called the asteriskos, ※, used when proofreading poetry to mark lines that were duplicated. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a symbol used to correct defects remained.

The "at-sign," @, has a surprisingly long history. It has been found on documents as far back as 1345,, where it appeared in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle. Originally, it wasn't used for email addresses! Instead, merchants used it in documents to represent a unit of measure for wine – the amphora (equivalent to about 1/13th of a barrel). This symbol likely stemmed from the Latin word "amphora," which referred to the large clay jars used to store wine. In a mercantile document sent by Florentine Francesco Lapi from Seville to Rome on May 4, 1536, @ was used to denote an amphora  of wine.

The nabla is a triangular symbol like an inverted Greek delta, which in math and physics, indicates a gradient or slope. Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton introduced the symbol in 1837, and Scottish mathematician Peter Guthrie Tait named it nabla because its downward-pointing triangle shape resembles a type of ancient harp with a similar name.

Nabla

The ampersand (&) was  regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as taught to children in the US and elsewhere. It was seen as a ligature of the letters 'e' and 't' to form the Latin word 'et' meaning 'and'. So the alphabet would go X,Y,Z and And. An example may be seen in M. B. Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. To distinguish it from the rest, children started to say 'and per say and' which later evolved into 'ampersand'. 

The 'Swastika' was a symbol of well-being and harmony used by Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains until the Nazis decided to culturally appropriated it to an Aryan symbol to boost a sense of ancient lineage for the Germanic people.

In Hungarian, the @ symbol is called a kukac, which means "little worm" or "maggot."

In German slang, the @ symbol is called a klammeraffe or "spider monkey."

Robert Recorde invented the symbol '=' in 1557 to avoid having to write "is equal to" over and over again.

The pound symbol (£) is an L and is actually short hand for “Libra” - The basic unit of weight in the Roman Empire.

The world's oldest known smiley was on a 1635 Slovakian document, indicating the writer's happiness with the state of the Chamberlain of Trenčín's financial records.

By Breathe Icon Team. Wikipedia

The inventor of the modern smiley face symbol, Harvey Ball (1921-2001), was paid just $45 for the design. The American artist behind the now-ubiquitous smiley face spent just ten minutes on the design and did not copyright his creation. After Harvey Ball's death, his son Charlie said: "He left this world with no apologies and no regrets, happy to have this as his legacy."

The @ symbol was chosen for the first electronic mail because the developer, computer scientist Ray Tomlinson, "was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much."

In addition to the Percent sign (%) for 1/100, there is also a Per-mille symbol (‰) for 1/1,000 and a. per-the-thousand symbol called a Bias Point (‱) for 1/10,000.

Swearing

In his letter to the Galatians, St Paul used the strongest swear word in the Greek language to denounce those who were tempting his readers to alter and/or desert the true Gospel of Christ. Paul wrote in Chapter 1:8-9: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!” 

The F-word was uttered for the first time on British TV by the theater critic Kenneth Tynan in 1965 on a show about the portrayal of sex on stage.

Four-letter words used by angry footballers set a problem for the GPO in the mid 1960s. Reports on bad language offences had to go by post to the FA Disciplinary Committee. To avoid embarrassing FA secretaries, the envelopes are marked "Not to be opened by females". But the secretary of the Referees' Association said many members were worried that they were open to prosecution by the GPO, which banned obscene language in letters.

In Georgia, it is illegal to use profanity in the presence of a corpse.

In the United States, people from Ohio are the most likely to use curse words.

By Threeboy from Richmond, Canada - Jay & Trey Cartoon Swearing,

The world record for the most swear words in a television program is 201 in episode one of the comedy Strutter. The 20-minute episode, averaged out to about ten expletives every minute. Produced by Objective Productions, it starred Paul Kaye as American lawyer Mike Strutter and aired on MTV on 9 November 2006. The show was canceled after just one season.

The record for highest average number of swear words per TV episode, is topped by the HBO crime show The Wire, which accumulated around 102 in every instalment. 

In the 2013 motion picture The Wolf of Wall Street starring Leonardo Di Caprio,  the f-word is used 506 times - an average of 2.81 times every minute. This means the film is the mainstream movie with the most swear words ever released.        
  
Analysis reveals that an average of roughly 80-90 words spoken each day are swear words.

For the most part, Japanese doesn't have a distinct group of curse words like other languages do.

You're not allowed to swear if playing at the Wimbledon lawn tennis championships. As such, line judges have to learn curse words in every language.

Will Smith doesn't curse in his raps because his grandma once told him not to.

Obscenities, profanities and vulgarities are all distinctly different from one another. Obscenity typically relates to sexual matters. Profanity relates to religious matters like blasphemy. Vulgarity is coarse language.

According to Australian Geographic, pet birds like parrots and cockatoos that have escaped from captivity are inadvertently teaching wild birds the swear words they learned at home.

Over 90% of the last word spoken by an airplane pilot just before the crash is, "s---".

Spelling

Written words in Old English had no standardized spelling, but were spelled phonetically.

English spelling rules developed through the work of the early printers, who had to decide how particular words would be spelled in their books. It is asserted, for instance, that the spelling of "ghost" with the silent letter h was adopted by William Caxton due to the influence of Flemish spelling habits.

Caxton's 1476 edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection 

The word which is "merry" today was spelled in about 30 ways in written sources from the 9th to the 16th century.

Spelling of the English language only really became standardized with the publication of Dr Johnson's Dictionary in 1755.

Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras, was a French nobleman who was executed during the French Revolution. Upon reading his death sentence in 1790, he remarked to the authorities "I see that you have made three spelling mistakes".

Differences between American English and British English spelling came about mainly as the result of one man. Noah Webster (1758–1843). His American Spelling Book was the preferred English text in schools through 19th century America. Words were broken into syllables, which helped students learn pronunciation. By the end of the 19th century, it had sold 100 million.

Noah Webster's Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, a forerunner of An American Dictionary, was published in 1806. In his dictionary, he chose s over c in words like defense, changed the re to er in words like center, and dropped one of the Ls in traveler. Webster's main reason for his new spelling rules was to help children learn to read and write.

Title page of 1828 edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language By Cullen328

Although Webster is credited for introducing such distinctive American spellings as color and humor (for British colour and humour), many of his innovative spellings (including masheen for machine and yung for young) failed to catch on.

Pennsylvania is misspelled “Pensylvania” on the Liberty Bell, because that was one of several acceptable spellings of the name in the 18th century.

Before his execution in 1790, the Marquis de Favras, upon reading his death warrant stated, "I see that you have made three spelling mistakes."

Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads were written in the ordinary soldiers language and slang. They featured deliberate spelling and grammar mistakes. "adn't none." and "wot makes im to perspire." It was a shot by Kipling at the convention that the standard poetic language should always be used.

The last name of How to Win Friends and Influence People author Dale Carnegie was not originally named Carnegie - in an example of how to influence people, he changed the spelling from Carnegey to resemble the name of the more influential Andrew Carnegie.

BBC radio's first quiz show, broadcast on November 25, 1937 at 5.30pm, was an inter- regional spelling competition. A one-off radio contest for children, it gave rise to a long-running quiz series, Regional Round.

George Bernard Shaw was concerned about the inconsistency of English spelling and backed the idea of a new phonemic alphabet. He illustrated his campaign for spelling reform by using the word "ghoti" as a respelling of "fish." "Gh" (f) as in cough, "o"(i) as in women, "ti" (sh) as in nation. Shaw willed a portion of his wealth aid the cause.

J.R.R. Tolkien didn't mean to change the spelling of "Dwarfs" to "Dwarves" in Lord of The Rings. He said it was a mistake that neither him nor his editors spotted.

The now-accepted spelling of "donut" did not overtake the more traditional "doughnut" in America until Dunkin Donuts stores dotted the nation a few decades ago. According to Grammarist, only one-third of American writers use "donut," with most preferring "doughnut."

In 2016, a group of hackers nearly stole $1 billion from the New York Federal Reserve but were discovered when they misspelled "foundation" as "fandation" in money request transcripts. However, they still managed to get away with $81 million.

'Misspell' is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language.

Misspelling occasions

The most misspelled word in English is 'separate'.

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable".

The highest number that can be spelled out without using any letter more than once is five thousand. The next highest is eighty-four.

Sign language

HISTORY

Sign languages have always existed in deaf communities. In ancient texts we see authors commenting about deaf people and sign language.

One of the earliest written records of a sign language is from the fifth century BC, in Plato's Cratylus, where Socrates says: "If we hadn't a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn't we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?"

Many medieval monks were forbidden to speak at meals. So an elaborate sign language evolved. Monks that were forbidden to communicate with their hands talked with their feet instead.

Native Americans created a universal sign language that allowed two thirds of all Indigenous tribes to communicate across most of North America, hundreds of years before Europeans invented a sign language of their own.

In the western world, the first studies dedicated to sign languages date from the 17th century. In 1620, the Spanish priest Juan Pablo Bonet published Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos (‘Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak’) in Madrid, a text about teaching deaf people to speak, using gestures as a tool.

An engraving in Juan Pablo Bonet's book 

The language of signs created by Bonet was used by Abbé Charles-Michel de l-Épée (November 24, 1712 - December 23, 1789), to create a finger-spelling alphabet in the 18th century. This alphabet has changed very little since then, and is still used today in France and North America.

Even before l-Épée developed his alphabet, a 200-strong deaf community in 18th-century Paris were already used Old French Sign Language, and could read and write in French. This was a great advance, because it proved that deaf people could be educated and didn’t needed speech to think and learn.

It is said that the Abbé de l'Épée stumbled across two sisters communicating in signs and, through them, became aware of the Parisian signing community. Épée saw their signing as beautiful but primitive, and he set about developing his own unique sign system ("langage de signes méthodiques"), which borrowed signs from Old French Sign Language and combined them with an idiosyncratic morphemic structure which he derived from the French language.

Epée founded the world's first free school for the deaf, in Paris in the early 1760s. The students there were taught Épée's French sign language and alphabet. As deaf schools inspired by Épée's model sprung up around the world, the language was to influence the development of many other sign languages, including American Sign Language.

Charles-Michel de L'Épée (1712-1789).

Helen Keller (1880-1968) lost her sight and hearing at 19 months, probably from scarlet fever or meningitis. As a child, she developed her own sign language to communicate with her parents. She went onto become a world renowned political activist and crusader for the handicapped.

International Sign (IS), an international pidgin sign system was first used, at the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) congress in Bulgaria in 1976. Today, it is the sign language used at international meetings such as the WFD congress, events such as the Deaflympics and in video clips produced by deaf people and watched by other deaf people from around the world,

FUN SIGN LANGUAGE FACTS

The sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s funeral was accused of being a ‘fake’, as he made meaningless hand gestures that did not reflect established signs.

In 2003 British Sign Language was recognized as an official British language.

Two men and a woman signing. By David Fulmer from Pittsburgh

Papua New Guinea's government has officially endorsed sign language as the country's fourth official language, alongside English, Tok Pisin and Motu.

Deaf people who speak the US sign language ASL are unable to understand those who speak BANZSL, the sign language used in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. There is only a 31% overlap between the two languages, meaning that even though their respective countries speak English, their deaf communities are unable to communicate.

Until 1979, deaf kids in Nicaragua were stigmatized and barred from normal school. With deaf schools opening, teens developed a unique language, after rejecting the sign language the teachers attempted to teach. Within six years younger students joining were fluent and versed in the new sign language, stunning linguists. It is now the official sign language of Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan Sign Language is the only language created to have been recorded from its birth.

Just as some people talk in their sleep, sign language speakers have been known to sign in their sleep.

Babies can learn sign language well before they learn to speak and this can help them will full language later on.

Apes can learn sign language and communicate using it.

Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is a large black stone stele bearing a translation of Ancient Egyptian text, the first recovered in modern times. It was taken from building material in Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta when it was rediscovered on July 15, 1799 during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt.

The discovered part of the stone is 114.4 centimeters (45 in) high at its tallest point, 72.3 centimeters (28.5 in) wide, and 27.9 centimeters (11 in) thick.

The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum.By © Hans Hillewaert,

Weighing nearly one ton, the Rosetta Stone is inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt on March 27, 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of King Ptolemy V. The texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic script and Demotic script and in Ancient Greek. This meant the stone could serve as a translation key, with the Greek portion, in particular, helping scholars crack the hieroglyphics, which had died out around the 4th century.

Study of the decree was already under way when the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. English physician and polymath Thomas Young "made a number of original and insightful innovations" in the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in 1814. However, it was 20 years before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was announced by Jean-François Champollion in Paris in 1822; it took longer still before scholars were able to read Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently.

Champollion's table of hieroglyphic phonetic characters with their Demotic and Coptic equivalents (1822)

After British troops defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, they seized the stone and transported it to London. It has been on public display at the British Museum since 1802, and is the museum's most-visited object.

During World War I, bombing scares prompted British Museum officials to move the Rosetta Stone, along with other select artifacts, to a nearby Postal Tube station situated 50 feet underground.

France finally got its chance to host the Rosetta Stone in 1972. The occasion was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Champollion’s Lettre a M. Dacier, which outlined his translation of the artifact's hieroglyphics. It was housed at the Louvre in Paris for a month.

Since its rediscovery, the stone has been the focus of nationalist rivalries, including a long-running dispute over the relative value of Thomas Young's and Jean-François Champollion's contributions to the decipherment, and demands for the stone's return to Egypt.

Source Mental Floss

Morse code

HISTORY

After establishing his reputation as a portrait painter, Samuel Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) devoted his middle age to creating a fast way of sending messages. He was prompted to do this after being told his his wife was ill via a horse messenger — but the letter had taken so long to reach him that by the time he arrived home, she was not only dead, but had also been buried.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse, 1840

While returning by ship from Europe in 1832, Morse encountered Charles Thomas Jackson of Boston, a man who was well schooled in electromagnetism. Witnessing various experiments with Jackson's electromagnet, Morse developed the concept of a single-wire telegraph.

Morse's system sent pulses of electric current along wires which controlled an electromagnet that was located at the receiving end of the telegraph system. A code was needed to transmit natural language using only these pulses, and the silence between them. Morse therefore developed the forerunner to the modern International Morse code.

At the Speedwell Ironworks in Morristown, New Jersey on January 6, 1838, Samuel Morse and his assistant Alfred Vail successfully used Morse Code to send a message. It read: "A patient waiter is no loser." This first public transmission was witnessed by a mostly local crowd.

Original Samuel Morse telegraph

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first ever long distance morse code message down an experimental telegraph line that ran from Washington DC to Baltimore, Maryland. It read "What hath God wrought!," which is a quote from the Old Testament Book of Numbers. The discovery of electronic communication was attributed to God who had given the power.

Morse with his recorder, photograph taken by Mathew Brady in 1857

The Modern International Morse code, or continental code, was created by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848 and initially used for telegraphy between Hamburg and Cuxhaven in Germany.

After some minor changes, International Morse Code was standardized at the International Telegraphy Congress in 1865 in Paris.

The International Morse Code encodes the ISO basic Latin alphabet, some extra Latin letters, the Arabic numerals and a small set of punctuation and procedural signals (prosigns) as standardized sequences of short and long signals called "dots" and "dashes", or "dits" and "dahs", as in amateur radio practice.

'SOS' is the Morse-code signal (…---…) used by shipping and the like in distress to summon immediate aid, hence any urgent appeal for help. This distress signal was first adopted by the German government in radio regulations effective April 1, 1905. It was recommended at the Radio Telegraph Conference the following year and officially adopted as the worldwide standard on July 1, 1908.

During World War II, the famous "Da da da daa" opening bars' suggestion of Morse Code became the powerful symbol of "V For Victory," the effective call-sign for the Allied Forces. Many relished the irony of a German's music galvanizing the Allied effort to defeat the Nazi war machine.

A typical "straight key". This U.S. model, known as the J-38, was manufactured in huge quantities during World War II.

An American POW in Vietnam blinked the Morse code for TORTURE during a propaganda interview.

VHF radio and other digital communication methods became increasingly prevalent throughout the late 20th century, eventually rendering Morse Code obsolete for naval communication. When the French Navy officially ceased using Morse Code on January 31, 1997, the final message they transmitted was "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence."

In 2010, the Colombian government successfully transmitted a Morse message to 16 captive soldiers by composing a song titled "Better Days" popular enough to hit local top 40 radio and disguising the Morse Code in a synth interlude.

FUN FACTS

The S.O.S. letters are simply a convenient and readily recognizable combination, and are not an abbreviation, although they have subsequently been held to stand for "save our souls" or "save our ship."

Thomas Edison suffered from deafness and he taught his fiancée, Mary Sitwell, Morse code. He proposed by tapping out the message in her hand. She answered in the same way. After their marriage they often spoke to each other in Morse code.

When they attended a play, Thomas Edison's wife kept her hand on her husband's knee and Morse coded the words.

Due to his father's dislike of his immature hobby of Morse code, the 10-year-old Giuseppe Marconi set up a laboratory in the attic, where he fiddled around with his early electrical transmitters, making his signals travel further and further. All Marconi's early messages were in Morse code. He had no idea they would lead to radio broadcasting.

Early radio messages were sent in Morse code because voice transmission required more power and better signal control than were available at the time.

The BBC began broadcasting in Morse code to the French Resistance on March 22, 1942.

During his time serving in the Air Force, Johnny Cash was employed as a code breaker based in Germany, intercepting Morse Code transmissions from Russia.

When the telecommunications entrepreneur Robert A. Brooks had his corporate headquarters built in St. Louis, the arrangement of windows spelled out "Brooks Fiber Properties" in Morse code.

The Colombian army once made a song with Morse code in it and aired it in rebel-controlled territory to lift the morale of hostages held there. The message read "19 rescued, you're next. Don't lose hope."

The Nokia tone for an incoming SMS text message is the Morse code for 'SMS'.

Mandarin (language)

Mandarin is China’s official language, but 292 other languages are spoken by its estimated 1.4 billion population.

It is spoken from the whole northern part of China down to Yunnan Province in the southwest corner of the country.

One-third of the population of China can't speak Mandarin.

There are many regional differences in vocabulary, so somebody who moves from Beijing to Yunnan wouldn't be able to understand people there who were speaking their own language, Yunnanhua.

Because written Chinese uses characters to represent concepts rather than sounds, speakers of Mandarin can communicate with speakers of different Chinese languages such as Cantonese through writing, but not speech.

In the 1920s, the Chinese government set up a national language based on the Beijing dialect and on the most widely understood words and pronunciations.

Mandarin is the language of government and education of China and Taiwan, with the notable exceptions of Hong Kong and Macau where a local dialect of Chinese called Cantonese is more often used.

Mandarin is spoken by over 800 million people around the world, more than any other language.

Most people emigrating from the Greater China region now speak Mandarin, while in the past it used to be Cantonese or Taishanese, another local Chinese dialect.

Standard Mandarin is one of the six official languages at the United Nations. The others are English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian.

Mark Zuckerberg's wife is American-born Chinese, and the Facebook founder has been learning Mandarin for several years. On October 22, 2014, Zuckerberg visited Tsinghua University for an interview, throughout the duration of which, he spoke in Mandarin.

Herbert Hoover once worked in China as an engineer. When he became American president he and  his wife used to talk in Mandarin Chinese to prevent White House staff from eavesdropping.

Cangjie, a legendary figure in ancient China (c. 2650 BC), is claimed to be an official historian of the Yellow Emperor and the inventor of the Chinese writing system. Legend has it that when he invented the characters, the deities and ghosts cried and the sky rained millet. Cangjie was the eponym for the (c. 220 BC) Cangjiepian proto-dictionary and the Cangjie method of inputting characters into a computer.

Portrait of Cangjie

Mandarin is written with Chinese characters called Hàn Zì which literally means "Han characters".

Each Hànzì has its own pronunciation and meaning. An ordinary dictionary will contain about 10,000 characters.

There are over 50,000 Chinese characters. An educated Chinese person would only know about 8,000.

The exact total number of Chinese characters remains unknowable, since new ones are being developed all the time.

In Chinese writing, there is no capital letter, there are no spaces between characters, and characters have 10 strokes, on average.

Language

HISTORY

The book of Genesis in the Bible  tells us that the emergence of different languages happened in around 4,000 BC. It was God's punishment for man's presumption in building the mighty tower of Babel, in Babylonia which was a monument to their own greatness. He scattered the people all over the Earth and confused their language so they wouldn't understand each other.

By around 300 BC, early Celtic language had become Europe's first lingua franca, making it the English of its day.

The ancient Greeks often described foreign languages as sounding like "bar bar bar." Anyone who spoke a foreign language was called a Barbarian.

It was much because of the efforts of Ulfilas (c. 311–383), the first Gothic Bishop that the Germanic language began to get written down. He undertook to give the Goths the Bible in their own language and  consequently produced the first Barbarian translation of the Holy Scriptures. This marked out not only the beginning of Christianity amongst his people but of Germanic literature.

Modern English, Dutch and German all have their origins in the Old High German language heard between 500 and 1050 AD.

The Norman conquest led by William the Conqueror, The Duke of Normandy, fused French and English cultures. As a consequence, the language of England evolved into Middle English with an English syntax and grammar and a heavily French vocabulary.

By the 12th century Middle English was fully developed, integrating both Norse and Norman features. However, it was only by 1200 that some religious texts were being written in the English vernacular rather than Latin.

English really emerged as the national language of England in the middle of the fourteenth century. When Henry IV acceded to the throne in 1399, he became the first English king whose mother tongue was English.

King James IV of Scotland conducted an experiment in 1493 which involved sending a deaf and dumb woman to the uninhabited island of Inchkeith, in the midst of the Firth and Forth, with two infants. He hoped that when the children learnt to speak, free from normal communication, they would reveal the original human language.

As a college student, Isaac Newton tried to invent a universal language that would let people know what any word meant just by hearing it.

The first person to decipher an extinct language was the French scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, In 1754, he deciphered the Palmyrene alphabet, a historical Semitic alphabet used to write Palmyrene Aramaic. Barthélemy managed to do so literally overnight by studying bilingual inscriptions.  Four years later he deciphered the Phoenician alphabet. 

Determined to bring about the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language as a way of unifying Jews, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had what is believed to be the first modern conversation in Hebrew in 1881 while living in Paris.

German polyglot Emil Krebs (November 15, 1867 - March 31, 1930) mastered 68 languages in speech and writing - including Mandarin and all those spoken in today’s European Union - and studied 120 other languages. His private library contained the Bible in 61 different languages.

Emil Krebs

After Krebs died, his brain was recovered and is still kept as an ‘elite brain’ at the Vogt Institute for Brain Research at Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf.

The government of South Africa declared Afrikaans an official language in 1925.

The two Voyager probes that were launched in 1977 each contains a space message to any extraterrestrials who might find the spacecraft as it journeys through interstellar space.  In addition to pictures and music and sounds from earth, greetings in 55 languages were included, Swahili is not included in the 55 languages,  because the person did not show up to the studio.

During a joint sitting of both houses of the Indian Parliament on June 6, 2004, President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam announced that Tamil was to be made the first legally recognized classical language of India. This followed a political campaign supported by several Tamil associations.

The word "Tamil" in Tamil language

The Eyak language in Alaska became extinct in 2008 after Marie Smith Jones, the language's last native speaker, died, an event that became a symbol in the fight against language extinction.

DIVERSITY

A recent Languages Of The World publication lists 7,097 languages spoken on Earth. Around 40 per cent of them are in danger of disappearing.

The Mandan language, spoken by the Mandan people of North Dakota, was officially declared extinct after the death on December 9, 2016 of its last fluent speaker, an elder named Edwin Benson.  The Mandan people are a Native American tribe that has inhabited the Upper Missouri River Valley for centuries. Their language, Mandan, is a Siouan language that is closely related to Hidatsa and Crow. 

It was the most recent North American language to become extinct.

One of the most recent worldwide languages to become extinct was Aka-Cari, a Great Andamanese language spoken by the Cari people, who originally living on the northernmost part of North Andaman Island and on Landfall Island in the Indian Ocean. The last speaker, a woman called Licho, died from chronic tuberculosis on April 4, 2020 in Shadipur, Port Blair, the capital city of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. 

While it is difficult to pinpoint a single "most recent" language extinction—as a language is often only declared extinct years after its last speaker passes—the most significant and well-documented recent loss is the Yaghan language (also known as Yámana) of Chile. The Yaghan language effectively became extinct on February 16, 2022, with the death of Cristina Calderón at the age of 93.

Calderón was the last native speaker of Yaghan, an indigenous language of the Tierra del Fuego region at the southern tip of South America. Before her death, Calderón worked with her granddaughter and daughter to create a dictionary and a book of stories to ensure a record of the language remained.

The ten most spoken languages in the world are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French, in that order.

With 1.2 billion native speakers, Mandarin Chinese is easily the world’s biggest language. Spanish is the second biggest language with 329 million speakers, slightly ahead of English (328 million),

Swahili is the official language in more countries than the one with the most native speakers, Mandarin Chinese.

Zimbabwe has 16 official languages, which is more than any other country. South Africa comes second with 11.

According to data from the 2011 Census, the five languages most spoken in the UK are English, Polish, Welsh, Punjabi and Urdu, in that order.

Africa accounts for nearly 25 percent of the languages spoken on Earth.

There are 11 official languages in South Africa. No other country has as many.

800 different languages are spoken in New York City, making it the most linguistically diverse city on Earth.

Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Amharic all belong to the Semetic family of languages. 'Semetic' is derived from the name Shem, one of Noah's sons.

International Mother Language Day (IMLD) is a worldwide annual observance held on February 21 to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism. The idea to celebrate International Mother Language Day was the initiative of Bangladesh. In Bangladesh February 21  is the anniversary of the day when Bangladeshis fought for recognition for the Bangla language. Mother Language Day is part of a broader initiative "to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world" as adopted by the UN General Assembly on May 16, 2007.

UNUSUAL LANGUAGES

There are about 6,900 languages in existence but more than half the world’s population uses only 20 of them.

 2000 of those languages have less than 1000 speakers.

The most complex language to voice is !Xóõ, spoken mostly in Botswana—it has 112 distinct sounds, while English has about 40.

About 70 per cent of words in !Xoo (including !Xoo itself) begin with one of 83 types of click.

The Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea has a 12-letter alphabet, the world's smallest.

Some peoples in New Guinea have entire languages that are used only when harvesting a specific kind of nut because they believe that their ordinary language is bad for the nut's health.

In the Pirahã language, spoken by a tribe in the Amazon jungle, women have only seven consonants at their command, while men have eight.

Maltese is the only dialect of Arabic written in the Latin alphabet, and is the only Semitic language that has official status in the European Union.

The Basque language (spoken near the Spain/France border) isn't in any language family and is completely distinct from any other language in the world. It is the only surviving Pre-Indo-European language in Western Europe.

The last speaker of Cornish as a first language is thought to have died in 1777. In 2009, Unesco listed the Cornish language as 'extinct' but in 2010, after protests, Unesco stated that the Cornish language was not extinct after all.

There exists a dying Mexican language called Ayapenaco. The only two people left in the world that can speak it are a pair of elderly men who refused to talk to each other until 2014 when they decided to make amends to try to prevent the language from going extinct.

The Old Testament was translated into Cornish in 2004 and the New Testament in 2011. The Book of Genesis begins: "En delathuaz deewe aveth wraz neave ha no are."

To create the Elvish language, J.R.R. Tolkien drew heavily from the Finnish and Welsh languages.

The Ewok language is a combination of Tibetan and Nepali.

The linguist who created the Klingon language for Star Trek also created the Atlantean language for Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

For the sci-fi movie Avatar, a linguist created an entire ‘alien’ language, Na’vi, from scratch, with words such as "Kaltxì" for Hello, "Nga2 for You and "Tskxe" for Rock.

The directors of Despicable Me actually wrote a language for the gibberish the minions speak throughout the movie. Each word has a meaning.

FUN FACTS

Of the 13 languages attested from before 1000 BC, only two (Ancient Chinese and Mycenaean Greek) have descendants which continue to be spoken to this day.

Babies can learn sign language well before they learn to speak and this can help them with spoken language later on.

Newborns are born "universal listeners" capable of distinguishing all 800 sounds across human languages, but by their first birthday, the brain prunes away non-native pathways to optimize for their native tongue. This early linguistic mapping permanently alters auditory perception, making foreign accents nearly inevitable for adult language learners.

Zipf's Law proposed by American linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902–50) , says that in almost every language, the most common word will occur twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common word, and so on.

A 'creole' is a stable language developed from mixing other languages together suddenly (not just French/English - any pair of languages), while a 'pidgin' is a simplified bridging language between two languages.

The 19 As in Malaysian Scrabble is the highest number of one Scrabble letter in any language.

52 percent of people in the world can speak more than one language.

Bilinguals experience tip-of-the-tongue moments twice as often as monolinguals. Processing two languages at the same time comes with a computational cost. Although, this kind of “multitasking” trains the brain.

Bilinguals can be dyslexic in one language but not the other.

Ioannis Ikonomou works as a translator in the European Commission. He can speak 47 languages, including 21 of the 24 EU official languages. Ikonomou can also speak dead languages like Old Church Slavic.

Columbian pop star Shakira can speak English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and Portuguese fluently.

The astronauts on the International Space Station have developed a hybrid of English-Russian speech, a "space creole" called Runglish.

The words "mama" and "papa" are nearly identical across hundreds of unrelated world languages. This is because they are built from the absolute easiest lip and vowel sounds for human babies to physically produce while babbling and nursing, which parents then eagerly adopt as names for themselves.

The word "huh" appears in near-identical sound and function in 31 vastly different languages.

Sources Daily Mail, Daily Express