When you talk, you do not depend upon words alone to tell your listener what you mean. 【小题1】 You shrug a shoulder, raise an eyebrow, clasp hands, bend forward or backward, stamp your foot, nod or shake your head. These body languages may vary from culture to culture but they do help the speakers to convey meanings. 【小题2】 You yell or whisper; speak calmly or angrily; lower or raise your voice at the end of a statement or a question. Meaning in talk is also affected by pauses and silence, which are often as significant as words themselves. 【小题3】

Similarly, when we write, we cannot expect words alone to make clear to our reader what we have in mind. The pauses, stresses and gestures which occur in speech must be represented in writing by various marks of punctuation if meaning is to be fully clear. 【小题4】

Punctuation came into existence only for the purpose of making clear the meaning of writing words. Every mark of punctuation is a sort of road sign provided to help the reader along his way.【小题5】 It is harmful or ineffective if it interrupts the flow of thought from your mind to that of your readers.

Did you know the meaning of a word may change over time? Many English words we know now had different meanings a long time ago. One example is the word nice.

Around the year 1300, nice was first used in English to mean “stupid”. Two hundred years later, nice began to carry a “better” meaning. If people said a book was written nicely, they meant the book was written “clearly” or “carefully”, not “stupidly”. After 1800, nice began to take its meaning like kind or “friendly”. Since then, people have thought of nice as a word with good meanings.

A good change of a word’s meaning like this example of nice is called AMELIORATION. Though we don’t use nice to mean “stupid” any more, it is fun to know how much a word’s meaning can change from its start!

It is calculated that some of the world's 7, 000 languages are in danger of getting extinct.“For example, Ainu, a language in Japan, is now seriously threatened, with only 10 native speakers remaining” said lead study author Tatsuya Amano at the University of Cambridge in England.

The scientists found that 25 percent of the world's languages are threatened.After identifying where the endangered languages were, they looked for any environmental and social or economic factors those languages might have in common, such as poor areas or rapid population growth.“We find that at the global scale, language speaker declines(减少) are strongly linked to economic growth—that is, declines are particularly occurring in economically developed regions,” Amano said.

“One important finding of this new study is that languages in the tropics and Himalayan region are likely to be increasingly threatened in the near future, because these regions still have many local indigenous languages(本地语) with a small number of speakers, and at the same time are experiencing rapid economic growth,” Amano said.

Economic growth may endanger languages for a variety of reasons.For instance, speakers of endangered languages may view another more popular language as offering economic opportunities, and thus forego their own languages.“There are other important factors that might endanger languages,” the researchers said.For instance, policies regarding how languages are used and taught in schools can be very different among countries and even within each country, and these factors may explain more detailed patterns in language endangerment.

Amano suggested it could be possible to forecast future threats to the diversity of languages.“There exists detailed information on future changes in the environment, economies and climates,” Amano said.“Using such information, together with the findings of this study and further analysis, we would like to understand what will happen to the world's languages, where it will happen and which languages will be threatened in particular.”