The Book of Languages: Talk Your Way around the World

The Book of Languages: Talk Your Way around the World — page 3
Why language is important One of the most important differences between human beings and other animals is our use of language Language allows us to tell other people what we want what we think and what we feel and also understand what others are saying to us Nearly 7,000 languages are spoken in the world Some languages have many millions of speakers whereas some may have fewer than ten All of these languages do the same thing allow us to communicate with others We all need to greet people say who we are tell stories and jokes discuss and persuade even let off steam if we hit our thumb with a hammer To do these things we need language Qué You what In this book This book looks at 21 of the world’s languages You can fi nd out about their history and where they are spoken You can see what they look like and also learn to speak a few words and phrases pages 12 53 Despite their differences languages are related like humans You can fi nd out about the different language families on pages 10 11 Language is so important to us that we have created ways to communicate even when we cannot speak or hear On pages 54 57 you can fi nd out about some non verbal languages 6 Scripts and pronunciation Not all languages are written in the same way The written forms are called scripts Chinese can be written using characters like tiny paintings (cid:9209)(cid:11658) Russian script uses the Cyrillic alphabet with letters like this Ж English and lots of other languages use the Latin alphabet A B C etc In this book we have changed all the words into the Latin script so you can read them more easily This is called transcription The alphabets for each language with the names of the letters are shown on the side of the right-hand pages To make reading as easy as possible we have used the most simplifi ed transcriptions and also written the alphabets of all languages from left to right You’ll also fi nd short pronunciation guides that describe the way that letters sound when they are spoken