I recently heard a trivia question on the radio. It asked "There are over 6500 (blanks) in the world." My first thoughts were along the lines of skyscrapers or species of fish. I was surprised to learn that the answer was languages. I did a little more digging and found out that a good third of them are "remote languages" spoken by small villages or tribes of indigenous people who have little to no contact with the outside world.
STILL. That's a lot of languages. I find it pretty impressive when I meet someone who can speak half a dozen, but that doesn't even scratch the surface. So, anyhow, that sparked the idea for a puzzle. A double puzzle, really. Most Americans speak English, but how many additional languages can you speak? Well, many of you are about to learn a new one.
I like to think of it as the language of the skies, but it's not unique to the aviation industry. In fact, it's becoming more and more commonplace everyday. It's called the phonetic alphabet (I guess that's not REALLY a language, but I digress). The premise of the phonetic alphabet is pretty simple. How often are you on the phone spelling your last name or something similar and the person on the other end just butchers it completely because B sounds like P or M sounds like N. The phonetic alphabet is a substitution-style alphabet, so instead of saying A, you say Alpha. Each word in the phonetic alphabet was chosen because it easily identifies the letter you're trying to represent.
While the phonetic alphabet has seen some changes in it's past, it's remained unchanged in most of our lifetimes. I'll save you the effort of having to look up the words. They are listed below. Well, they are actually listed twice....but they seem to have been all jumbled up. See if you can find them, and then, see if you can't teach yourself another new language.
