Languages: bridge or barrier?

For most people, the beginning of the new year is a special occasion and the signal for happy celebrations. If we could travel around the world on a magic carpet and peep at these celebrations in the various countries, what a wonderful variety of customs we should find. The Feast of the Lanterns concludes two weeks of a noisy, gay spectacle ushering in the New Year for the Chinese who almost seem to be celebrating all their holidays of the year at once. In Japan, New Year's Day is even gayer. No matter how poor a Japanese may be he provides himself with spotless new clothes and takes several days off to visit old friends or entertain them at home. Every gatepost is adorned with dark green pines and light green feathery bamboos while over the doorways hang vivid red lobsters and crabs, and scarlet tangerine-like fruits, symbolic of long life and happiness. The streets are thronged with children laughing and playing the whole day long, and everyone beams with joy, bowing and offering best wishes even to perfect strangers. Scotland celebrates New Year's Eve with a heartiness rarely surpassed. The tradition that to be "first-foot" in a house brings luck for the whole year sends midnight revelers into the streets, each one carrying cakes and food and drink to ensure his' host a bounteous year. So, throughout the world, in the Orient, in Africa, Europe and the New World, the new year is celebrated with elaborate festivities. It is an occasion for making fine new resolutions alas, not always kept for forgetting the disappointments of the past twelve months and for making a new start.

At the beginning of this new year, the Unesco Courier has wanted to do more than just offer its readers the traditional season's greetings. It has sought to "make a new start" too, and like the Japanese, to provide itself with "new clothes." In response to the desire expressed by readers it is abandoning its tabloid newspaper size for a new magazine format easier to read, handle and keep. It has increased the number of pages, designed a new cover in colour and prepared a brighter yet sober presentation. (…)

In its contents the Courier will continue to remain faithful to its set goal: to serve as a window opening on the world of education, science and culture through which the schoolteacher in particular for whom this publication is primarily conceived and prepared and other readers in general can look out on to wide global horizons. Each month it will present by text and image, features which are both informative and thought-provoking, and will devote a section to an authoritative treatment of an important world problem and show how it is being dealt with nationally and internationally. The Courier particularly invites comments, criticisms and suggestions from its readers. To the teacher who demands something more than run-of-the-mill fare, to those who are interested in people and problems of other nations, in the dramatic but little known story of ordinary men and women working together to raise standards of living, combat ignorance and disease, reduce racial prejudice and foster international understanding, to all those who are alert to today's events and problems in education, in the arts and the sciences, the Courier says: This is a periodical specially prepared for you. Join us by subscribing today at the new reduced rates.

The editors

COVER

This young Indian girl of the Amazon lives in the most polyglot of the five continents. Out of the 3,000 languages estimated to be used in the world today, more than 1,200 are spoken by Indians of the Americas some tribes of which number only a few thousand or even a few hundred people. By studying many of these obscure languages linguists have made discoveries about the nature of language itself and have in turn helped the language teacher with his problems.

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