What's your language?

One would not question the fact that the main difference between us humans and the rest of the species on earth is the power of speech - being able to communicate. Empowered by "language",  developed through complex thinking processes and an evolved larynx, we, the humans, have the biggest advantage that helped us move beyond hunting and gathering food to taking flights to the sun and moon.

It has been a very uniform evolution pattern for humans across the world, wherever people stayed on the planet. Starting from becoming two legged from four-legged, cultivation, eating habits, hunting, running, eating with hands and not legs ;-) etc.. But why do different people on Earth speak different languages? One wonders why there are so many languages, some of them spoken by millions of people, while some, just by a few hundreds. And the scripts of these vary a great deal too. Left to right, right to left, top to bottom etc, evoking much interest in their purpose and origin.

Purpose, yes, there definitely is. Speech is definitely the fastest way of communicating. Think about sign language, or eye-language, or any other means of communication, spoken one stands out as the fastest and even helps people multi-task. You could do other things while speaking, except when you are eating, that is. :) And when the spoken one had its limitations, distance being one of them, people came up with scripts, to carry the language from one place to another (think letters!)

Origin is what confuses me. If people all over the world eat pretty much the same stuff, walk and run alike, think almost alike, how come they came up with different languages? Is language not something that is built into the human gene? Of course, the very fact that any person can learn any language of the world itself means that language is not genetic but a purely learned thing.  
              Probably each group that stayed together developed their own language, to be understood within their circles. They might have been unaware of other people on a different continent doing the exact same thing. If only they knew, all of us would have had just one language. :)

Lack of communication between early humans, thus, seems to be the reason for so many languages coming up in the first place and now, that very fact that these languages are so different is stopping us from communicating with each other :) Guess, we have come full circle on this one.

 Could we have done better if there was some built-in language into our human genes? Just like we have two eyes, two ears, if all us spoke the same language, we would have saved much time in learning foreign languages and many a barriers would have come down. Right?

Speaking of languages.. does anybody know what the newest language is?

Did I hear somebody say Java........!!!  :)

The First Decade of the century...

This day marks an era of my foray into the world of computers. Today marks six years at work and counting a good four years at college before that would make it a decade with the man-made-machines. So comes the new design to the blog, to celebrate.

Roughly ten years ago it was, that I wrote my first C program, and as anybody would guess, it was the hello.c program which printed "Hello, world!" with the exact punctuation and capitalization :-)

int main() 
 {
        printf("Hello, world!");
        return 0;
 }

What struck me the most at that point was the colors on each word, which I came to know later was called 'syntax highlighting'. Back in school days, all I knew was BASIC and it did not have this feature. So it was kind of new and colorful. What started then became a hobby, then a vocation and later a profession.

In these ten years, I have seen transformations and advancements in the computer industry of all kinds. But the biggest and the most far-reaching one in all of them would be the "collaborative web". Powered by the likes of wikipedias and the youtubes, this revolutionary idea has changed the game called internet.

 Back in the day a website meant information being pushed one-way i.e., from the websites to the internet users. If you had some information and wanted the world to know about it, there was no direct or rather "free" way of doing it. You had to buy website hosting services and host a website of your own.

 But today, if you have some information to share, you have a host of websites ready to present it to the world, all for free. Take blogger. I have been able to write for over so many years, without spending a single pie. Take wikipedia, or youtube, or yahoo answers. The collective knowledge of all the people in this world, wherever they are on the planet, is readily accessible.

 There were thousands of instances, personally for me, when this altruism of fellow internet users helped me find relevant information, that too in a few minutes.

 Imagine going to a library and searching through books when you want to find about interesting tour places in Japan, or understand what an "off side" meant in football, or the Bertrand Russell’s paradoxes or the billion things you to go to the internet every other minute.

 All of this has been possible through the advancement of technology, yes. But underlying the success of these collaborative projects is the benevolence of mankind in contributing their time and effort in making these projects so useful to all of us.

 It is these acts of selflessness that raises hope for a better tomorrow and fills one's thoughts with optimism in a day where we hear more about the bad than about the good.

 Hope, Empathy and Peace.