"There are 178 parent languages on our planet, with over 1000 dialects. It's amazing we communicate at all."

Funny, the way I'd always heard (read) it ever since elementary school, there's many MORE languages than that; eight hundred LANGUAGES (i.e, NOT "dialects") _in India alone_. And Jared Diamond adds another, was it six hundred or eight hundred?, languages in Papua-New Guinea alone (Ben, you've read _GG&S_ -- can you correct/confirm?).

AFAICR, the correct number was something like six or eight thousand "languages on our planet". (Unless "parent languages" means something like "Indo-European" [and Fenno-Ugric, Turkic, etc] -- which would make, for instance, French, German, and English "dialects of the same language"?!?)