Great Uncle Fred, why do people have different languages? (Anonyous Young Person, Autumn 2009)

Well, by the time we (human beans) got clever enough to start making up words for things, we were already scattered around the world. I imagine the first words were what are called ONOMATOPOEIAS, which are words that sound like the thing they describe, like "splash" or "biff". And then, like Adam and Eve, the olden-days people set about thinking of names for things, and then thinking of names for ideas. Would you like to know some of the many different ways that you can say "I love you". Well, there are about 6,800 known languages although only about 2,260 are written down, so these are only a very small proportion. But here goes: "I love you" (English) "Ta gradh agam ort" (Gaelic) "Konoronhkan" (Mohawk) "Ikh hob dikh lib" (Yiddish) "Maite zaitut" (Basque) "Tare Prem Karoo Choo" (Gujarati) "Es Tev Milu" (Latvian) "Wo ai ni" (Mandarin) "Ti amo" (Italian) "Techihhila" (Sioux) "Ngo oi ney" (Cantonese) "Bon sro lanh oon" (Cambodian) I suppose that all the different languages show how different we are in a way that makes us think how similar we are. It`s fun. That`s why we have different languages! It`s fun.

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