Emperor Napoleon using an Imperative Sentence

Rwanda, a small landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa, has decided to change instruction in schools from French to English.  The French language was brought to Rwanda by Belgian colonizers.  On July 1, 1962, Rwanda was granted full independence from Belgium.

Rwanda has been in the news in recent years because of the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda’s Tutsis by Hutu militia.  Now that the country is gaining some stability, there is a new focus on agricultural development and international trade.  Most Rwandans speak the local Kinyarwanda language or French, but fewer than five percent speak English.

The emphasis on trade has made Rwandans aware that French is only spoken in France, and small parts of Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland. Whereas English is spoken worldwide even in countries like China.  Rwandan Senator Aloisea Inyumba said:

“Introducing English is just being realistic.  English is the language of business“

All Rwandan government employees are now required to learn English.

   

The hyoid bone is the only bone in the body that is not directly connected to another bone.  The hyoid is supported by the muscles of the neck and it, in turn, supports the base of the tongue.  Scientists agree that the hyoid bone and its position in the throat is what makes human speech possible.

Some time ago, it was discovered that Neanderthals had hyoid bones.  This made it possible to deduce that Neanderthals living throughout Europe 230,000 years ago were able to speak.  A new discovery of two hyoid bones from the middle Pleistocene site of the Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca (Spain) indicates that the predecessor of the Neanderthal, Homo Heidelbergensis, was also capable of speech.  The researchers conclude that “Modern hyoid morphology was present by at least 530 kya [thousands of years ago] and appears to represent a shared derived feature of the modern human and Neandertal evolutionary lineages inherited from their last common ancestor.”[1]

Once language got started, pre-humans could coordinate their activities and argue about religion and politics, just like we do today.

[1] Martínez I, Arsuaga JL, Quam R, Carretero JM, Gracia A, Rodríguez L, Human hyoid bones from the middle Pleistocene site of the Sima de los Huesos (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain), Journal of Human Evolution, 2008, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 118-124. PMID: 17804038

English is the most common language in international trade, but there are many people in the world who do not understand English. Over 313 billion web pages have been published on the World Wide Web, and approximately 70% of them are written in English. Here are some global internet statistics of web content by language:

Language	Percent of web content
English	68.4%
Japanese	5.9%
German	5.8%
Chinese	3.9%
French	3.0%
Spanish	2.4%
Russian	1.9%

It is important to consider that the native language of people using the internet is not always English. About 30% of the web surfers are English speakers, but 15% speak Chinese, and 9% speak Spanish. Here are some statistics of the percent of users who surf the internet.

Language	Percent users	Number of users
English	30.1%	379M
Chinese	14.7%	185M
Spanish	9.0%	113M
Japanese	6.9%	88M
French	5.1%	64M
German	4.9%	62M
Portuguese	4.0%	51M

From these statistics, it is evident that Chinese and Spanish readers are being underserved. Web sites seeking to expand their global audience should consider translating some of their pages to make them accessible to speakers of other languages.

ScientificPsychic.com uses the following national flags to indicate the availability of web pages in other languages:

	English
	Spanish
	French
	German
	Russian

To see an example of an internationalized web page see:

English Verb Conjugation and Inflectional Morphology

Bonobo - the gentle ape

I recently watched a re-run of a PBS NOVA special about bonobos.[1] For some time, scientists have known that chimpanzees and bonobos share about 98% of their DNA with humans. Current research has shown that bonobos can use and understand language.[2] Analysis of the behavior of the two apes indicates that chimpanzees are bullies, fighters, and murderers who dominate by force, whereas bonobos are peace-loving, social, and sometimes join peacefully with non-related groups of bonobos. Researchers think that unity between the high-ranking bonobo females and year-round social sexual encounters between all members of the bonobo group help to reduce conflicts.

Humans have aggressive traits as well as social traits. The NOVA program tried to imply that the personality of humans may be closer to bonobos than to chimpanzees because we aggregate into social groups, we are very sexual, and we have some altruistic traits. However, as a background to the story, the program mentioned the regional war that spread through the Congo which is the native habitat of bonobos. The researchers studying the bonobo were detained as spies and were lucky to survive the ordeal. The war brought great misery to the area when food became scarce and thousands of people lost their lives through aggression, starvation, or disease.

There is great irony in trying to find good qualities in mankind when there are so many conflicts around us. The lessons of the great world wars have been largely forgotten. Words like Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Gaza, Sudan, and Abu Ghraib evoke images of chaos, destruction, famine, and new forms of torture like “waterboarding”. We may be closer to chimpanzees than we would like to admit.

[1] Nova Special on the Bonobo

[2] Linguistic Capabilities of the Bonobo

To be or not to be …

The verb BE is the most frequent and most misused verb in English. It is also the most irregular. BE may be used as an auxiliary verb or as a linking verb. Here is the conjugation of the verb “to be”:

Contractions of the verb “to be” are very peculiar because some forms can be confused with possessive nouns and must be disambiguated using context. Finally, there is the forbidden word “ain’t” which is used indiscriminately for “is not” and “are not” disregarding person agreement.

Learn about the usage of the verb “to BE”

In Spanish, the written language is a fairly accurate phonetic representation of the words. This is why “baseball” is spelled “beisbol”. In English, the spelling of words is more the result of tradition, rather than phonetics. Every person who has ever tried to write English knows that the spelling of English words has to be memorized. The English language resulted from a mishmash of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon heritage modified by the influence of the Roman and Norman conquests.

What is the function of the silent “E”? The silent “E” is responsible for the difference between the pronunciation of “HAT” and “HATE” or between “CAP” and “CAPE” or between “HOP” and “HOPE”. Although the final “E” is not pronounced, it indicates how the vowel preceding the consonant should be pronounced. The “A” in “HAT” is called a short vowel, whereas the “A” in “HATE” is called a long vowel. Long vowels are usually diphthongs, i.e., two adjacent vowels with a smooth transition from one vowel to another.

Learn how short and long vowels affect the patterns of conjugation of regular verbs in English.

On August 03, 2006, Google made available a database of words and adjacent word combinations, called N-grams, obtained by scanning 1,024,908,267,229 words of running text. The file of single words, or unigrams, contains 13,588,391 unique words.

On the surface, it would appear that this is a mountain of gold, but alas, the correct words are just as scarce as real gold. My unofficial estimate from looking at the list of single words is that up to 95% of the words are misspellings. Although the file has useful linguistic applications, not much can be done without great expenditure of manual effort. To give you an idea of what you can find in the unigram file, here is the word “BUSINESS” and some of the misspelled forms with their frequencies after consolidating differences in case, e.g. businnes 2771, Businnes 1692, and BUSINNES 556.

business 637134177, busines 475319, buisness 414822, busnes 325022, bussiness 267372, bussines 62980, buisiness 57730, busness 50547, busnesau 41934, businss 41188, bisiness 35434, businness 31919, busienss 29023, busniess 28329, businees 27374, businesse 26663, bsuiness 17297, busineess 16524, busuness 15509, busiiness 15095, businese 14907, buziness 14568, ubsiness 14367, bbusiness 14319, businesa 14126, busibess 13950, busineas 13819, busoness 13815, buseness 12346, busiuness 11329, businessa 11106, busieness 11081, buesiness 11048, busineass 11026, businiss 10846, buissness 10832, busioness 10817, busainess 10608, busuiness 10590, busoiness 10548, buseiness 10521, busibness 10475, businiess 10420, businessi 10330, buseeness 10234, businesso 10224, businessu 9845, businoess 9814, businoss 9813, busineiss 9732, busineoss 9704, bisnes 8466, bisness 7784, busnois 5288, businnes 5019, busseness 3596, buiseness 3252, buisnes 3186