Babel Around the world in twenty languages

Gaston Dorren

Book - 2018

A tour of the world's twenty most-spoken languages explores the history, geography, linguistics, and cultures that have been shaped by languages and their customs.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Atlantic Monthly Press 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Gaston Dorren (author)
Edition
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition
Item Description
Maps on end-papers.
Physical Description
360 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits, charts ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780802128799
  • Introduction: twenty languages: half the world
  • Vietnamese, 85 million: linguistic moutaineering
  • Korean, 85 million: sound and sensibility
  • Tamil, 90 million: a matter of life and death
  • Turkish, 90 million: irreparably improved
  • Javanese, 95 million: talking up, talking down
  • Persian, 110 million: empire builders and construction workers
  • Punjabi, 125 million: the tone is the message
  • Japanese, 130 million: linguistic gender apartheid
  • Swahili, 135 million: Africa's nonchalant multilingualism
  • German, 200 million: an eccentric in central Europe
  • French, 250 million: death to la différence
  • Malay, 275 million: the one that won
  • Russian, 275 million: on being Indo-European
  • Portuguese, 275 million: punching above its weight
  • Bengali, 275 million: world leaders in abugidas
  • Arabic, 375 million: a concise dictionary of our Arabic
  • Hindi-Urdu, 550 million: always something breaking us in two
  • Spanish, 575 million: ¿Ser or estar? that's the question
  • Mandarin, 1.3 billion: the mythical Chinese script
  • Japanese revisited: a writing system lacking in system
  • English, 1.5 billion: a special lingua franca?.
Review by Booklist Review

Linguists may recognize 6,000 living languages, but, in just 20 of these, Dorren finds the means whereby three-quarters of the planet's population communicate, either as native speakers or capable adopters. In surveying this score of tongues, Dorren teaches readers a great deal about how languages survive, evolve, and spread. Readers learn, for example, why the small country of Portugal has so successfully exported its language and why Malay triumphed over 700 other languages as Indonesia's dominant language. Readers learn a good deal, too, about comparative syntax and pronunciation: Dorren explains, for instance, how Spanish reflexive pronouns differ from their English counterparts and how the tonal structure of Punjabi contrasts with that of Mandarin. But as he shifts focus from language chapter to language chapter, Dorren delves into social and political dynamics affecting speech and writing. Readers see, for instance, how language differences triggered civil war between Sri Lanka's Tamil and Sinhalese speakers and how segregated lexicons created what Dorren provocatively labels gender apartheid in Japan. A fascinating foray into global linguistics.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Linguist Dorren (Lingo) expertly unpacks the baffling exceptions and structural oddities of the world's 20 most-spoken languages in his delightful latest. After noting that mastery of the full list would allow fluent conversation with three-quarters of the world's population, Dorren begins his linguistic journey in Vietnam, home of the 20th most-spoken language. Chapters open with capsule descriptions that detail regions where each language is spoken, number of speakers, script, grammar, sounds, loanwords, and "exports" (words adopted into other languages), followed by an idiosyncratic essay on striking elements of the featured language (e.g., there are no articles in the Russian language; Portuguese has 15 vowel sounds that can be "combined into many different diphthongs and triphthongs"). Fifteen pages per chapter sets a brisk pace, but Dorren always succeeds in sharing his delight at the intricacies and compromises of human communication. His focus varies widely: for example, the "linguistic gender apartheid" of Javanese (at #16) follows a pointed discussion on the Tamil language in India and Sri Lanka ("the Tamil Tigers were the protagonists in a civil war that tore the island of Sri Lanka apart.... And the conflict was triggered by language"; with 90 million speakers, Tamil is the 18th most-spoken language). Yet whether he is debunking common misunderstandings about Chinese characters or detailing the rigid caste distinctions ossified in Javanese, Dorren educates and fascinates. Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

A more apt title for this offering might be Babble, as this smorgasbord of 20 widely spoken languages is largely a stew of Dorren's (Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages) impressions and opinions that occasionally serves up delicious bloopers-e.g., nouns are not "conjugated"; verbs are conjugated, nouns are declined. Of the languages selected are those well known (in the West) such as French and Spanish, as well as the lesser-known Punjabi, Swahili, and Tamil. Each chapter offers a chart listing various characteristics of the tongue; it would have been helpful for comparison purposes if the same characteristics were used for each language. For instance, the author claims the subjunctive is a "bugbear" to master in Spanish yet doesn't mention it's equally complex in French. Oh, and English hasn't "borrowed" words from Greek; English has descended from Greek through Latin and French. VERDICT There's little consistency of presentation in this work from one section to the next, and grammatical terms are often not defined. Readers with a nonacademic interest in global languages might enjoy this buffet. Bon appétit!-Edward B. Cone, New York © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Multilingual Dutch journalist and linguist Dorren (Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages, 2015, etc.) proves to be a genial, fascinating guide to the modes, manners, and curiosities of the most-spoken languages in the world.Among an estimated 6,000 languages in existence, 20 are spoken by half the world's population. From Vietnamese (85 million speakers) to English (1.5 billion speakers), the author investigates cultural, historical, and political influences that shaped the language, beginning with a succinct overview of the language's significant traits: writing system, family (Austronesian, Indo-European, etc.), grammar, and sounds. He also offers a sampling of words borrowed from other languages and those exported to English: lilac, from Turkish; safari, from Swahili; and eight pages of the plethora of English words derived from Arabic. Among the 20 selections are several that reveal deep-seated social divides. Japanese (130 million speakers), which has no grammatical gender, requires women to speak in a distinctive "genderlect": using slightly longer versions of words to make them sound polite and using different pronouns from men. Those differences, dating as far back as 794, have been abating over the past 25 years, Dorren writes, with women in films, theater, and on TV using speech that has "a much more masculine character than before." Javanese (95 million speakers) has "an exceptionally extensive formality system" in which every word has a synonym that reflects and reinforces Java's social hierarchy. That language is becoming endangered, with Malay (275 million speakers) having become the official language after Indonesia's independence in the late 1940s, uniting a population spread across nearly 1,000 islands, speaking over 700 different languages. Punjabi (125 million speakers), like Vietnamese, Hmong, Swedish, and Mandarin, is a tonal language, in which the meaning of the same word changes depending on the tone in which it is spoken. In conveying unfamiliar sounds, Dorren uses English spelling conventions but helpfully directs readers to his website, languagewriter.com, where sound files are available.A deft, spirited exploration of the connection of language to a nation's identity and culture. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

When people speak Japanese, their gender matters a great deal. A good number of words and grammatical constructions are associated with either women or men. For starters, women are more likely to use slightly longer versions of words that make them--the words, and consequently the speakers--sound polite. Think of it as not only saying the refined word 'luncheon' instead of the more workaday 'lunch', but making the difference systematic by also saying 'tableon' instead of 'table' and 'flowereon' instead of 'flower'. In Japanese, this politeness syllable is added not at the end, but at the front: hana 'flower' becomes ohana. Next, women and men will use different pronouns to refer to themselves: while watashi is a formal word for 'I' or 'me' that both genders can use, atashi is clearly a women's word and ore , boku and oira are men's. Both genders will use the word for 'be' differently: in a sentence like 'this is a spider', men will include da for 'is' ('this da a spider'), whereas women will omit it ('this a spider'). They will use different interjections: for example, 'Hey, you' translates as Nē, chotto for women, but as Oi chotto or yō chotto for men; both men and women can use ā where English would have 'oh' (as in 'Oh, how beautiful'), but only women may also choose ara or mā . Men may pronounce the diphthong /ai/ (rhyming with English lie) as /ē/ (rhyming with lay), whereas it would be unladylike for a woman to do so. Speakers do not exactly break a hard-and-fast grammar rule when using elements normally used by the opposite gender, but they certainly break a social convention: they bend both a rule and their gender. Excerpted from Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.