Variety among languages. The first language has now morphed into 6,000 worldwide. The variety among them is awesome: they are not just variations on the French, German, and Russian we learn most often in school, nor are such languages as Chinese the limit in terms of the variation.

A. There are languages with clicks. The clicks change the meaning of words just as vowels and consonants do in English. The clicks are written with symbols that look rather like profanity in comic strips. In Nama, spoken in Namibia, hara means “swallow,” !hara means “to check out,” |hara means “to dangle,” and  hara means “to repulse.” One click language has 48 different click sounds.

B. There are languages in Australia with just three verbs. In Jingulu, the only verbs are come, go, and do. Beyond this, Jingulu speakers use such expressions as “go a dive” and “do a sleep.”

C. There are languages that pack a whole sentence’s worth of meaning into one word. In Yupik Eskimo, to say, “He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer,” one says,

Tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq.