{"id":846,"date":"2025-05-02T22:13:03","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T21:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/?p=846"},"modified":"2025-05-02T22:13:05","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T21:13:05","slug":"think-in-5-d-learn-a-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/2025\/05\/02\/think-in-5-d-learn-a-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Think in 5-D: Learn a Language"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>There are around 140 language families on the planet. Nearly half of all people speak a language from only one of those families as their native tongue, never mind all those who speak them as second or subsequent languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That family is Indo-European, and it includes English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and some other very big hitters in terms of global speakers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As the world continues to globalise, we will inevitably lose languages and even entire language families. Some <a><\/a>projections suggest we might be down to only five or six major languages by 2500. Of those, only probably Arabic and Chinese stand a chance of being non-Indo-European languages spoken by anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once upon a time, I scoffed at learning my national language, Irish. What&#8217;s the use? Who gives a shit about old myths? Anyhow, it was all tied up with politics and my limited brain could only just about accommodate French.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now I regret that decision, like I regret not maintaining my knowledge of Attican Greek and Latin, not properly learning Italian, Russian or Turkish, and being so scared by Hebrew and Arabic that I gave up on day one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because languages aren&#8217;t just interchangeable modes of communication. Each one expresses an entire culture, and even more, a wholly unique way of conceiving of the world. To speak more than one language is to see the world in multiple dimensions at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I envy my five year old his bilingualism. It&#8217;s a gift I intend to jealously defend for him, and no doubt on occasion even against his future wishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you want to save culture and add literal dimensions to your brain, learn a language. Start today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are around 140 language families on the planet. Nearly half of all people speak a language from only one of those families as their native tongue, never mind all those who speak them as second or subsequent languages. That family is Indo-European, and it includes English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and some other very big &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/2025\/05\/02\/think-in-5-d-learn-a-language\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Think in 5-D: Learn a Language&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[438,224,36],"tags":[568,565,494,300,570,569,566,564,499,71,100,567],"class_list":["post-846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-history","category-politics","tag-arabic","tag-chinese","tag-english","tag-french","tag-greek","tag-hebrew","tag-hindi","tag-language","tag-latin","tag-linguistics","tag-russia","tag-spanish"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcnZAt-dE","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":847,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions\/847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}