15 And damage to the brain’s superior temporal gyrus can lead to Wernicke’s aphasia. Patients sound as if they are speaking normally, but what they say makes no sense.
16 In old Westerns, Native Americans often made a sound like “ugh.” This wasn’t a commentary on the plots; it was a naive attempt to reproduce the sound of the glottal stop of many Native American languages, produced by briefly closing the vocal cords during speech.
17 !Say !What? When the Dutch encountered Africa’s Nama people, whose language includes clicking sounds, they dubbed them Hottentots, Dutch for “stuttering.”
18 Really foreign sounds: Spanish Silbo, a whistle language, has only four vowel and four consonant sounds. Audible for miles, it resembles bird calls and is indigenous to—where else?—the Canary Islands.
19 Indian Sign Language is the world’s most widespread silent language, with some 2.7 million users.
20. Another sound of silence: More than one-third of the world’s 6,800 spoken languages are endangered. According to UNESCO, about 200 tongues now have fewer than 10 surviving speakers.
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