When this series started, the Bradford family consisted of Tom, the father, a respected columnist for the Sacramento Register, Joan, his wife for about 25 years, and the eight children of the couple, all of them were very normal but quite independent. Unexpectedly, actress Diana Hyland died of cancer and was written off the series after 5 episodes.
Let's first take a closer look at the linguistic diversity that existed five hundred years ago. In 1500 there were probably about 7 thousand languages spoken across the earth, most still groupable into the 25 or so major families represented today.
When people are asked how many languages they think there are in the world, the answers vary quite a bit. One random sampling of New Yorkers, for instance, resulted in answers like âprobably several hundred.â However we choose to count them, though, this is not close.ne might suppose, therefore, that linguists would have a clear and reasonably precise notion of how many languages there are in the world. It turns out, however, that there is no such definite countâor at least, no such count that has any status as a scientific finding of modern linguistics.