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If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you
could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what
makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500
tongues?
Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and
extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their
origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers
their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their
vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how
their grammars order their speakers' worldview.
Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an
intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny
Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why
Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to
be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those
of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention
the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', or how Tamil
pronouns keep humans and deities apart.
Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.
Welcome to Europe as you've never known it before, seen through the
peculiarities of its languages and dialects. Combining linguistics
and cultural history, Gaston Dorren takes us on an intriguing tour
of the continent, from Proto-Indo-European (the common ancestor of
most European languages) to the rise and rise of English, via the
complexities of Welsh plurals and Czech pronunciation. Along the
way we learn why Esperanto will never catch on, how the language of
William the Conqueror lives on in the Channel Islands and why
Finnish is the easiest European language. Surprising, witty and
full of extraordinary facts, this book will change the way you
think about the languages around you. Polyglot Gaston Dorren might
even persuade you that English is like Chinese.
English is the world language, except that most of the world
doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Dorren calculates
that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people
in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than
twenty languages. He sets out to explore these top twenty world
languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the
surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Babel whisks the reader on a
delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how
these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away and
showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother
tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics or elegant but
complicated writing scripts, and mind-bending quirks of grammar,
Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations:
each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to
those born into it as they are surprising to the outside world.
Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks
can't read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in
practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese
developed separate "dialects" for men and women. Dorren lets you in
on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in
Hanoi, debunks ten widespread myths about Chinese characters, and
discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the
world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty,
fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you
look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.
Whether you're a frequent visitor to Europe or just an armchair
traveler, the surprising and extraordinary stories in Lingo will
forever change the way you think about the continent, and may even
make you want to learn a new language. Lingo spins the reader on a
whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing
quirky moments from their histories and exploring their
commonalities and differences. Most European languages are
descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit
known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the
continent's ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a
linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in
discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into
today's remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is
still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country
whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up
until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never
use the word you in conversation, leading to tiptoeing questions of
the form: Would herr generaldirektoer Rexed like a biscuit?
Spanning six millenia and sixty languages in bite-size chapters,
Lingo is a hilarious and highly edifying exploration of how Europe
speaks.
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