Other Language Families

Approximately half of the world's population speaks one of the Indo-European languages. Five of the remaining language families (Figure 4-3), including the Sino-Tibetan, Malayo-Polynesian, Semito-Hamitic, Niger-Congo, and Dravidian account for an' additional 40 percent.

The Sino-Tibetan family includes the various Chinese languages along with Thai, Lao, Burmese, and other languages of East and Southeast Asia. Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are based on two principles that differ from those underlying the Indo-European languages. First. Chinese is constructed from a small number of one-syllable sounds. The absence of polysyllabic words implies that each sound denotes many different words. The listener must infer the precise meaning of the sound from the tone of voice and the context of the sentence in which it is spoken.

The principles underlying writing also differ in the Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European languages. English and other Indo-European languages are written with alphabets. Each symbol in Indo-European alphabets represents a single letter. The letters have no inherent meanings. By contrast. each symbol in Chinese represents a word, idea, or concept.

The large number of characters makes learning to read Chinese very difficult. Dictionaries contain over forty thousand characters. Just to read an ordinary daily news-paper, a person must know at least two thousand characters. The difficulties associated with the large number of characters were compounded following the invention of movable type. Typewriters containing even a small number of characters proved unwieldy and difficult to use. In response to these difficulties, the Chinese government has recently encouraged the use of a phonetic alphabet similar to those used for Indo-European languages.

Despite the difficulties associated with learning to write Chinese, the Chinese writing system has contributed to the cultural uniformity that has long been characteristic of China and East Asia. The various "dialects" of Chinese including Wu. Min. Gan. Yueh. and Hakka are actually distinct, mutually unintelligible languages, as different from one another as French. Spanish, and Italian. In written form, however, each of the Chinese languages is identical. The meaning of each character remains the same.

Even prior to the invention of the printing press, a document written anywhere within the Chinese culture realm could be read unambiguously by any literate person. During the long periods of imperial rule, the uniformity of the Chinese language aided the imperial bureaucracy in holding together the vast, far-flung Chinese empire.

The Semito-Hamitic languages include Arabic and Hebrew. Nearly 200 million people throughout the Middle East and North Africa speak Arabic. Hebrew is the official language of Israel, and it is spoken in Jewish communities throughout the world.

The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken in Indonesia. Malaysia, and Southeast Asia as well as in Madagascar. Scholars believe that the ancestral Malayo-Polynesian language was spoken in Southeast Asia and that the Malayo-Polynesian languages were diffused to the distant island of Madagascar by Indonesian merchant sailors hundreds of years ago. Other Malayo-Polynesian speakers moved eastward in small boats, settling the many islands located throughout the western and central Pacific Ocean. Today. Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken over an area extending more than halfway around the world.

Languages in the Niger-Congo family are found throughout sub-Saharan Africa and are believed to have originated in western or central Africa. Over several hundred years, Bantu speakers moved southward and eastward, displacing speakers of other languages. Dravidian languages are dominant in southern India. The distribution of the Dravidian family has contracted over the past several hundred years, as Dravidian speakers were driven into southern India by Indo-European invaders from the west and north.