When I captured this image yesterday I only saw the peahen and the peacock sitting opposite each other…
When I looked at that image in my file again this morning I saw the peacock and the peahen perched opposite each other and a chicken perched right in the middle on high.
When it was time to edit the shot I saw another chicken central to the peacock, the peahen and the high up chicken but down low. 
Learning is a bit like this. A slow addition of information.
Did you know that New Zealand has three official languages Maori, English and New Zealand sign language.
The United States of America has no official language. Though English is more widespread with Spanish closing the gap but the Founding Fathers did not write a language choice into their constitution.
Switzerland has three official languages French, German and Italian though I have a friend who is a coroner in a Geneva hospital and he works almost exclusively in English. (Though he is French).
France is French. Denmark is Danish. Russia is Russian and Singapore is English, Malay, Chinese Mandarin and Tamil.
All international airline pilots ( and their crew) must be proficient in English – this is an aviation law.
By 2017 around 80 percent of science papers were first published in English – no matter their origins.
In 2001 the International Maritime Organisation deemed English the official language mandating the use of English for commercial mariners.
The list is long of international organisations and institutions where English is being officially mandated as the language of choice for international communication.
Although my research gives me varied numbers we can estimate that around 300 million individuals in China are presently learning English. The population of the United States is 327.7 million.
Whereas 500 years ago about 5 million people spoke English – almost all in the British Isles: the conservative number of fluent English speakers in the world now is 1.5 BILLION.
So – you see what this weeks essay is about!!
Have a lovely day.
Celi
The weeks forecast in case I don’t get back to it.
The Kitchen's Garden 
53 responses to “SYMMETRY”
Thank you for taking us along for the lesson. I love learning something new each and every day. I was brought up bilingual, with German being my first language. My father spoke to me in English and I answered in German. I was five when I started school here and really had to work at the nuances of English. My mother never, ever got jokes in English. I am so delighted you are reaching out your already over extended hand to help others learn this language. It’s interesting how you can see something you missed before when you get the time to look harder.
Getting jokes in another language is so hard. Not to mention that when people tell jokes they often talk really fast!!
I also liked Kate’s original question because I’m fluent in the languages of the countries where I’ve lived (U.S., Hungary, Switzerland and France) plus a lot of Latin and some others I can get by in. But it was only in Hungarian where my brain would just give up because the theory about worldview and language structure was true. After much struggle I could speak it well but so many words and concepts are the opposite of how we express them in English. For example, the family name comes before the first name (Liszt Franz, not Franz Liszt), when friends meet they say ‘Szia’ (see ya) and when they part they say ‘Hello!’ There is no verb that means ‘to have’ and the alphabet has at least 5 extra letters. There is no future tense. So when a Hungarian and I, a native English speaker, are trying to converse in either language we don’t always have words for the concept we want to get across. Eha probably understands this fundamentally because he is from a country whose language is also Finno-Ugric . Fascinating!
well done.
So interesting Celi 🙂