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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 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.… (more)
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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 ( edited by Daniels and Bright, and 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.
"Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages" is a follow-up to "Mr. Dorren's 2015 "Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages". You can see a theme here. I haven't read "Lingo" but it's said to be "breezy", an adjective I hardly associate with language.
Mr. Dorren begins with his
People who study many languages learn each one faster than the one before if they have a good teacher and are motivated to learn. (I can't tell you how often I've played with French). Sir Richard Francis Burton the explorer, is said to have known 29 languages and could pick up a new one in a week. I'm not that good, but I can do a lot in 3 weeks immersion with a good teacher. I haven't tried Vietnamese though and so I'll give Mr. Dorren some leeway.
But how does he manage to make the stories of these languages so very dull? Language study is fascinating, whether you come at from linguistics, history, culture, or learning. As other reviewers have mentioned, Mr. Dorren doesn't focus on any of these but tries to present them all in some measure. But the focus keeps changing and there is no good rhythm.
I received a review copy of "Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages" by Gaston Dorren (Grove Atlantic) through NetGalley.com.