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Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

Tekijä: Gaston Dorren

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
335777,376 (3.9)3
Grammar & Language Usage. Language Arts. Nonfiction. HTML:English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak itâ??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.… (lisätietoja)

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Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 7) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
My interest in picking up this book was strictly light entertainment, particularly in regards to the foibles of English, though Dorren gives the same treatment to the other nineteen languages he examines. If there is a running theme below the mission of providing a snappy introduction into what makes each of these 20 languages interesting, it's how language can become a bone of contention. If you come away feeling that Dorren's treatment is too slight for your purposes, don't worry; he provides an extensive list of further reading. ( )
  Shrike58 | Feb 22, 2024 |
Wonderful descriptions of the world’s twenty most-used languages, with history about how they developed and comparisons of their grammars. As an idiot single-language speaker I’m still really interested in other languages and this was a treat. ( )
  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
I wish every chapter had been its own book ( )
  hatingongodot | May 3, 2020 |
A truly fascinating look at the 20 most-spoken languages in the world, Babel is freewheeling, casual, and discursive, but not dumbed down or shallow—the kind of book Simon Garfield should be aiming for. The author is fluent in six languages and reads nine more. Because English is a learned language for him—his mother tongue is Limburgish, of all things, and I wish the format of the book had let him talk about that!—he has a perspective on it that I haven't encountered in books about language written by native speakers.

Each chapter examines a single language, or more precisely, examines either the linguistic features or the social history of the language's home culture. The close relation between some of the featured languages mean that not every chapter is actually about the language: there's not enough that's unique about Portuguese to fill a chapter in a book that also discusses Spanish, so the chapter on Portuguese is mostly about how languages spread through colonization. As a language geek--and who else would pick up this book--I would have preferred that the chapter discuss the variations in the several languages of the Iberian peninsula, and how only two became associated with political power. But that's just me. And there's certainly enough geeky linguistic detail (about cases, Japanese "women's language," and the importance of social status in Javanese speech, for example) to keep me happy.

Dorren refers to other rarefied books that I'm familiar with (The World's Writing Systems, edited by Daniels and Bright, and The Turkish Language Reform: a Catastrophic Success by Geoffrey Lewis), so he and I are of like mind. Perhaps because I find him so perceptive and discerning, I don't mind the liberties he takes, such as applying judgmental adjectives to certain language features or a slight tendency to glibness. Don't let me scare you: this is actually an easy read! The chapters are short and interesting, with much to learn on each page, and if you want to skip over the seven-page "dictionary" of Arabic roots or the chapter on Bengali (not that different from Hindi, from the perspective of one who is unlikely ever to learn either), it won't hurt a thing. This is also a fun book just to dip into. ( )
1 ääni john.cooper | Aug 16, 2019 |
he tour of the world's twenty largest languages doesn't pretend to be an exhaustive analysis or a detailed comparison. Rather, it looks at a striking feature of each language -- how it developed, for example, or who speaks it, or how it is written, or whatever. Some readers may object to this free and easy approach, but I found it both entertaining and informative. Terrific book for language mavens. ( )
  annbury | May 1, 2019 |
Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 7) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
ei arvosteluja | lisää arvostelu
Sinun täytyy kirjautua sisään voidaksesi muokata Yhteistä tietoa
Katso lisäohjeita Common Knowledge -sivuilta (englanniksi).
Teoksen kanoninen nimi
Tiedot hollanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Alkuteoksen nimi
Teoksen muut nimet
Alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi
Henkilöt/hahmot
Tärkeät paikat
Tärkeät tapahtumat
Kirjaan liittyvät elokuvat
Epigrafi (motto tai mietelause kirjan alussa)
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Language is such an intimate possession, something that one possesses in the same measure that one is possessed by it. Language is bound up with the foundations of one's being, with memory and emotions, with the subtle structures of the worlds in which one lives.
Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism
Omistuskirjoitus
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
[None]
Ensimmäiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Counting the world's languages is as difficult as counting colours.

Introduction.
Around 75 million native Vietnamese speakers live in Vietnam, where it is the only official language; half a million in Cambodia.

20. Vietnamese, TIẾNG VIỆT, 85 million speakers.

[The chapters are numbered from 20 to 1, for the smallest to the largest of the world's twenty largest languages].
Sitaatit
Viimeiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Erotteluhuomautus
Julkaisutoimittajat
Kirjan kehujat
Alkuteoksen kieli
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Kanoninen DDC/MDS
Kanoninen LCC

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Grammar & Language Usage. Language Arts. Nonfiction. HTML:English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak itâ??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.

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