What a wonderful world!
занимательные факты по английскому языку (8, 9, 10, 11 класс) на тему

What a wonderful world!

Scientia potentia est. 
Knowledge is power. (Latin)

What do you think how many languages are spoken by the inhabitants of our planet? 250? 1 000? Incredibly, the number of languages goes up to 7 000!!! Just think about this figure and imagine a city, where each of the 7 000 inhabitants speaks his (her) own language! The cacophony of sounds, performances of  gestures, different worlds, expressing emotions, culture and traditions! Fiction? Reality! Maybe not in the same ammount but we face a similar situation, going downstaires in the city subway, waiting for the flight at the airport or participating in an international conference.

Of course, you already know that many languages have long reached the international level and only a few dozen of them have official status in various countries and world For example, only 6 UN official languages: Arabic, English, Russian, French, Chinese and Spanish.

According to the Ethnologue website, supported by the Institute SIL International (17th edition of "Ethnologue: Languages of the World", updated as of March 2016)  ten the most common languages are:

• Chinese . Amazingly, the Chinese language has got 10 dialectical groups, and dialects are so different that people from different parts of China cannot understand each other. There is an elementary grammar - the absence of cases, declensions, the same type of phrasing. If not speaking about 40 000 hierogliphs that make up its written language.

• English. Interestingly, about 70% of the words in the language are borrowed. English is made up almost 57% of the world websites. None of the letters does not repeat in the English word "uncopyrightable". All the letters of the English alphabet are found in the English phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
• Spanish. Amazingly, in the 18th century, Spanish was considered the language of diplomats. Due to the abundance of vowels, Spanish is among the fastest languages in the world. A characteristic feature is the use of inverted question and exclamation marks.
• Hindi. It is interesting that this ancient language is the most common in India and enshrined in the Constitution as official along with 20 other languages. In Hindi there are no pronouns "he" and "she". The words order in Hindi is arbitrary and has no clear structure. The Devanagari alphabet consists of 55 letters.
• The Arabic language. Amazingly, the words are written from right to left. Capital letters in Arabic are missing, punctuation is also written from right to left, and instead of underlining, the overlining is used. There is almost no borrowing in the language – no more than 1 % of the total number of words.
• Portuguese. Interestingly, all people who speak Portuguese are called Lusophone. In Brazil there is the Museum of the Portuguese Language. The similarity of Spanish with Portuguese is 89%.
• Bengali. Amazingly,  the Bengal system of personal pronouns is rather complex and includes different options, depending on the degree of intimacy, the status of the speaker, position in space etc. There is no category of gender in the language. In actual Bengali words the main accent always falls on the first syllable.
• Russian  It is interesting that Russian is the most saturated synonymous language.
Most words with the letter «F» in the Russian language — borrowed. The longest noun in the language is  24 letters. English for successful learning the difficult phrase  «Я люблю Вас» -"I love you" use the mnemonic "yellow-blue bus".
• Japanese. Amazingly , the Japanese language has no future tense for verbs. In Japanese its own system of politeness – from respectful to very polite.  There are no names of the months, they use sequence numbers instead of them.
• Landna. Interestingly, this hypothetical group of Indo-Aryan languages spread mainly in the North-West and Central parts of Pakistan as well as in parts of India and Afghanistan.

And what interesting facts do you know about languages?