If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues?
Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview.
Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', or how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart.
Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Introduction: Twenty languages: half the world
- 20 Vietnamese | 85 million: Linguistic mountaineering
- 19 Korean | 85 million: Sound and sensibility
- 18 Tamil | 90 million: A matter of life and death
- 17 Turkish | 90 million: Irreparably improved
- 16 Javanese | 95 million: Talking up, talking down
- 15 Persian | 110 million: Empire builders and construction workers
- 14 Punjabi | 125 million: The tone is the message
- 13 Japanese | 130 million: Linguistic gender apartheid
- 12 Swahili | 135 million: Africa’s nonchalant multilingualism
- 11 German | 200 million: An eccentric in Central Europe
- 10 French | 250 million: Death to la différence
- 9 Malay | 275 million: The one that won
- 8 Russian | 275 million: On being Indo-European
- 7 Portuguese | 275 million: Punching above its weight
- 6 Bengali | 275 million: World leaders in abugidas
- 5 Arabic | 375 million: A Concise Dictionary of Our Arabic
- 4 Hindi-Urdu | 550 million: Always something breaking us in two
- 3 Spanish | 575 million: ¿Ser or estar? That’s the question
- 2 Mandarin | 1.3 billion: The mythical Chinese script
- 2b Japanese revisited: A writing system lacking in system
- 1 English | 1.5 billion: A special lingua franca?
- End Notes
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Yes, you can access Babel by Gaston Dorren in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Linguistics. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.