In a short timeframe, when you think about it, email has become the universal way to communicate with each other. We take it for granite today, but have you ever thought about how we communicated with other in years gone by? My Mother was a ‘great letter writer,’ a term that you just don’t think about these days – she would bang away on the typewriter, address that old envelope, lick (yes, we had to lick them back in the day) a stamp, and place it in the upper right corner of the envelope and place the final letter in the mailbox. Just as eagerly we would wait for the mailman to deliver a real, genuine letter to our house and my Mom would read it out loud – kind of like a bedtime story – so we could hear about our favorite cousins were doing and if they were coming to visit us.
Now we peck out a few keys on our computers, laptops, tablets or smartphones, push a button and it is GONE – out on the internet and almost instantly arriving at its destination’s server – ready for our recipient to download the email and read it. No more paper, envelopes, stamps, mail carrier, or even the entire postal division of our government had to be involved- fast, effective and cheaper than ever before to correspond with a friend, family member or business. If an email is too long, we can always send out a quick text message or even a tweet.
There are all kinds of email…Comcast, Verizon, Yahoo, AIM, Outlook, Facebook and our most beloved, Gmail from Google. Most of these emails are free and Google’s will translate the content to rid ourselves of the language barrier. Today they added support for thirteen new languages to the fifty-eight they already had – bringing the total to 71 languages that now covers 94-percent of the worldwide population that uses the internet! That is quite an accomplishment – one that we read about, but still do not fully comprehend its significance.
The new languages include: Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani (Azeri), Chinese (Hong Kong), French (Canada), Galician, Georgian, Khmer, Lao, Mongolian, Nepali, Sinhala, and Zulu. Google says that the thirteen new languages are rolling out today – not only for Gmail, but also for the smartphone browsers. Google worked very closely to make sure that the language was as close as possible to the original dialectics and even takes into accord the little nuances between like languages.