Alexander's mother, his parents, his teacher Aristotle told him the story of Homer's Iliad.

When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet.

But how would you actually go about testing such a theory?

I need you to invest in your mind.

The French also brought many Roman Catholic clergymen with them who added Latin words to the mix.

And I had all kinds of counting systems ready there in English, followed by German, followed by Spanish, followed by French.

I picked up some French.

So there you go. My name is John Hodgman.

At that time, at the tender age of seven,

If you think about the Islamic Golden Age, there were lots of translation then they translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic, into Persian, and then it was translated on into the Germanic languages of Europe, and the romance languages, and so light shone upon the Dark Ages of Europe.

The main thing it did is inspire me to go out with my camera and to tell other people's stories.

The Japanese translation of computer languages, like C language for example, is a bit strange but there are predefined appropriate terms.

To survive, to get back up on my new legs and to be able to come and tell their stories but also my own story.

In 1993 they declared the end of the armed struggle.

So I just like expanded everything I could think of in like one week.

There is more than one story about the Eye.

But we can actually see it right over here.

Our mind can move like lightening on certain subjects.

Your word represents language.

I learned French instead of German.

Were you talking to the TV again?

Did you ever make a speech in English?

We had 9 11.

like keep on using that complicated, expensive cure.

But to learn from this text, what we really want to discover is what individual words in Chinese correspond to individual words or small phrases in English.

I decided that I would learn Arabic, which turns out to be a supremely logical language.

She offers water, and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water.

For example, translating a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole Web, Wikipedia, into one other language, Spanish.

So in Jelly Bean, if we could go back a couple slides, please so in Jelly Bean, we've improved support for Arabic and Hebrew.

I go to the next place, and it happens logically and organically and truthfully.

And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TEDTalk today.

Let's see if we can go farther.

Neveu told us already.

We all, everybody, has a story that they follow.

Creation stories are part of every culture in human history, and they were usually told by some kind of a priesthood.

I was in the desert, under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali.

The man speaks English with a German accent.

I start speaking English, learning English, about a year ago.

Juliet talked to Romeo on the balcony, who was outside.

Quite good. He also invented a word called blas, meaning astral radiation.

There are already a number of languages out there for dealing with mathematics, things like MATLAB or Maple or Mathematica.

I had never really used my French beyond, you know, a few courtesies here and there.

Now, a film.

As a result, the platform grows, the language grows, and the needs of the programmer grow with it.

And, there is a third measure of attention that is much harder to measure.