Grove Press Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

A very good read for the lay man who is interested in language, culture and history. A missed a chapter about the languages of the indiginous people of the Amerikas.

Bra att ha

Gaston Dorren’s description of various features of the world’s twenty most spoken languages is anything but babbling. Although the book does not have a consistent theme, Dorren blends biographical, historical, and cultural material along with morphological descriptions of languages into something like a delicious cheesecake. There are no earth-shattering theses or discoveries, but the sparkling text and original material make the subject matter interesting, even for non-linguaphiles. For example, one can learn facts as various as the history of the Indian subcontinent and how it shaped Hindi/Urdu/Bengali as well as that Chinese characters are often joined together as syllables to make words. Dorren further explains why Portuguese and not Dutch is one of the world’s major languages and why learning German is so difficult for English speakers—though they were the same language some twelve hundred years ago. Throughout the text is marked by a welcome cosmopolitan approach to cultures and history. Dorren does not fall for the mistake of assuming that European culture has increasingly dominated the world and so the histories of non-European peoples before contact with Westerners are of little interest. Instead, the interaction between Aryans and Dravidians, the spread of Malay and the separation between Japan and China are all discussed. For someone who received a strongly Westernized approach to modern history in school, the lack of an overriding narrative was not fog-inducing but more like fresh air. I wouldn't say that everybody should read this book or that the book contains something that is going to be culturally transformative but if one is looking for something relatively light that still goes beyond pop-culture this is an excellent choice. With the holiday season upon us, Babel is an ideal gift for polyglots or merely just aspiring ones. A pleasant read all around.

My family loves languages and I was excited to find a book on this topic. The statistics about languages in the world are especially interesting and help to provide you with a better perspective on the languages you know, or want to learn. Many of the stories about the individual languages I had never heard before and were fascinating. However, I do think that the author needs a rethink on the way he organized the information. More than a survey on each language, with basic information shared on each one, this book gives you select, interesting facts about each language. Each chapter presents a language and sometimes he tells you about the grammar quirks, sometimes what it's like to learn the language, sometimes the history of the language, and sometimes how the language compares to others. But, there is no consistency from chapter to chapter. I recommend a rewrite using all the information he has, but fleshing out each language fully so you know all of these characteristics of it, and not just selected ones. I wanted to have my 15 year old read the book because she loves languages, but decided not to because of the organization of it.

As a Polyglot who has at some point studied 15 of these 20 languages, this book was absolutely fascinating. The author really knows how to pick fun facts that the audience would not necessarily know, even if they already speak the language. On top of that, you don't have to be a linguist to appreciate this book- it's written in such a way that casual fans, as well as hardcore enthusiasts, can appreciate and understand the content. Overall, a wonderful read, and I recommend this to anyone else who's curious about why we speak the way we do." 5 stars