Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages
(Hardback, Main)
By Dorren, Gaston
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If you were to master the 20 languages discussed in Babel you could chat to more than half the world's population. Actually, you could talk to another quarter of the world, who speak them as second languages. As he did in Lingo, Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddit...ies and extraordinary stories of these global tongues, tracing their origins and tracking their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He listens to their distinctly un-English sounds and deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their inventive coinages and surprising loans. He explains the oddities of their grammars, which order their speakers' worldview but often appear bafflingly complex to outsiders. Learn why Russian has no word for blue, how Turkish stopped borrowing word, and why Arabic is possibly the hardest global language to learn. Look into the future of Chinese script and re-examine the Latin alphabet's gory past. Consider the difficulties of having four forms for 'I' as in Vietnamese, and the questions that arise from the way Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at the world and how it speaks.
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ISBN |
9781781256404 |
Released NZ |
28 Nov 2018 |
Publisher |
Profile Books Ltd |
Format |
Hardback, Main |
Alternate Format(s) |
View All (5 other possible title(s) available)
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Availability |
Out of print
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Full details for this title
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Awards, Reviews & Star Ratings
NZ Review |
Praise for Lingo Joyful ... Lingo is that rare thing: a book about language the manages to be both genuinely interesting and enormous fun. Particularly impressive is Dorren's ability to flip with ease from jokes and surprising facts to the discussion of complex linguistic ideas ... -- John Gallagher * Sunday Telegraph Seven * Learned and pleasantly ironic ... [an] entertaining exercise in language tourism ... [Dorren's] tour of the continent is a richly diverting exercise ... He has something interesting to point out about nearly every topic ... brilliant -- Steven Poole * Guardian * A new approach to understanding the world ... ideal for any cunning linguist * Wanderlust * The depth and breadth of [Dorren's] understanding and knowledge are awesome ... this charming, funny and fascinating gem of a book has persuaded me of the richness we are in danger of losing. -- Rose Wild * The Times * |
UK Review |
Bertrams Star Rating: 3 stars (out of 5) |
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Author's Bio
Gaston Dorren is author of the bestselling Lingo (Profile, 2014) and contributes regularly to Onze Taal, the popular linguistics magazine. A true polyglot, he speaks Dutch, Limburgish, English, German and Spanish, and reads French, Afrikaans, Frisian, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Luxembourgish and Esperanto. For this book, he also learnt to speak Thai.
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