Today, there are 7150 languages in the world belonging to 142 language families. They originated and developed in different historical eras, and have survived to this day in their transformed and finished form. But such a large linguistic diversity is not an indicator, because almost 70% of the world's population uses only 40 languages, and the vast majority of the remaining 7110 are endangered.
History of writing
The beginning of the development of speech and writing - in our current understanding - can be called the appearance of the first pictographic symbols and hieroglyphs: in the period from the 5th to the 6th century BC. In the course of archaeological research, they were found in Mesopotamia, in the Syro-Palestinian region, on the territory of modern Abkhazia and on the Yellow River in China. These writings belong to the so-called "proto-writing", and developed to the present writing only by the 3rd-2nd centuries BC.
Thus, "real" writing in the form of structured symbols appeared in ancient Egypt in 3100 BC, in northwestern Hindustan in 3000 BC, and in ancient Sumer in 2750 BC. The writings found in Peru (2500 BC), Crete (2000 BC) and China (1400 BC) date back to later years. From 1000 to 100 BC, the Asia Minor alphabets, the Etruscan alphabet, the Hebrew square script and the Nabat script were created. As for the Latin alphabet - the most common today, it came from the Etruscan: around 400 BC.
A landmark event for world writing was the invention of paper in China, around the same time as the birth of Christ (0 AD). It has become a universal, and most importantly, a mobile carrier of information: unlike bulky stone tablets and tortoise shells, it has become widespread, first among the elites, and then among the middle class.
In parallel with Asian writing, European writing developed based on the Latin alphabet adopted in the Roman Empire. But it came to its modern form only by 1300, when the Carolingian minuscule was revived and the so-called “humanistic” writing was approved. In 1700, the Cyrillic alphabet was adopted in Russia (the “civil script” of Peter I), and in the 19th century, the global adaptation of the Latin alphabet to other languages began. To date, it is the most common, and is used in 131 out of 195 countries.
Interesting facts
- Of the 7150 languages in existence, the vast majority (90%) can only be heard in Africa and Asia. They are spoken by a total of 90-100 thousand people. These dialects are considered endangered, and are reduced every decade.
- One of the most prominent polyglots known to world history was Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti, an Italian cardinal who spoke 60 languages.
- The most common character in the world is the Latin letter "e". Especially in order to reduce its significance and refute its indispensability, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote the novel Gadsby in 1939, consisting of 50 thousand words that do not contain this letter.
- The largest stock of characters is in Chinese: more than 80,000. But almost all of them are not used in everyday life, and to understand 99% of what is written in the press and the Internet, it is enough to know only 2000 characters. And for 80% of understanding, 500 hieroglyphs are enough.
- If the font size is 12 pt, a standard A4 page will fit an average of 2400 characters without spaces. Thus, 1000 characters take up about 2/5 of the page, 2000 characters ─ 4/5 of the A4 format.
- Stella Pajunas-Garnand was the fastest typing in the world. In 1946, she reached 1080 characters per minute on an IBM electric typewriter. The modern winner, Englishwoman Barbara Blackburn, failed to break this record on a computer keyboard. In 2005, she typed 1060 characters in a minute.
- The average typing speed is about 200 characters per minute. It turns out that men type faster than women, although they have to type less often.
- There are 150,000 words in the Big Academic Dictionary.
In the informational 21st century, all textual data is translated into digital form, and into different languages. In the case of works of art and historical chronicles, translation and editing are entrusted to specialists, and for unimportant texts, there are automatic algorithms built into online translators and “character counters”. The latter “can” count not only the number of characters (with and without spaces), but also the number of paragraphs, words (monosyllabic and polysyllabic), syllables, sentences, paragraphs, etc. This greatly simplifies the work with text / language information, and allows you to bring it into the proper form automatically and without using a dictionary.
