книга о европейских языках. Без какогото глубокого анализа, каждому языку уделено околостраниц и, как правило, рассматривается только пара интересных фактов. Например, можно узнать, что исландская письменность почти не изменилась за тысячелетия, и современный житель этой страны легко может прочесть древние саги. А в Норвегии есть несколько официальных и несколько неофициальных систем правописания.
Написано все легко, с юмором, мне понравилось. Excellent book for anyone interested in languages and their intriguing relationships with each other, As a veteran of numerous attempts to learn French, Spanish, German, Russian, Greek and, now, Dutch, I applaud someone who really can and can write an engaging book about all of the European languages and more.
Bravo Tā kā šī bija jau trešā "valodu grāmata" šogad, neko ārprātīgi daudz es neuzzināju, bet tāpat interesanti,
Parasti tādu grāmatu lasīšanas laikā tādas domas mijas no "šo patiesībā pat varētu iemācīties, neizklausās grūta valoda", līdz "no way in hell" brīžos, kad nonākam līdz izņēmumu un īpatnību sadaļai.
It kā jau var šausmināties par rakstību citās valodās, līdz nonākam līdz nelielam piemēram visiem zināmajā angļu valodā.
If gh stands for p as in hiccough
If ough stands for o as in dough
If phth stands for t as in phthisis
If eigh stands for a as in neighbour
If tte stands for t as in gazette
If eau stands for o as in plateau
Then potato should be spelt ghoughphtheightteeau Przeciekawa książka, po której już zawsze będziecie inaczej patrzeć na różne języki.
I do tego jest wspaniały rozdział o językach migowych! This book was a joy to read! It's written in relatively layman's terms, so is easily accessible for the casual linguist or even just someone who is a little languagecurious.
I enjoyed the humour sprinkled throughout the book, too, The content is somewhat whirlwind as can be expected, since it claims to be a guide to a whole continent of languages! and sometimes I wish it had gone into a little more detail, but the Further Reading section at the end will be sure to quench that particular thirst of mine.
Would definitely recommend this book, Arrrrggh, there are so many languages in Europe! When will I ever have time to learn the mighty Turkish or the noble Armenian This book is basically all the jokes that language teachers like to tell about their pet subject, along with occasional photos of a lovely lady with a tenuous connection to the country, but it was good fun and now I want to read a separate book about every single language mentioned.
.stars
This is a neat little book, consisting of very brief chapters usuallypages highlighting some aspect ofdifferent languages of Europe, I learned a lot of fun facts and some useful background from it, Some articles are very informative, while others are quite lightweight or lean heavily on humor, and overall I didnt get as much out of it as this authors other book, sitelinkBabel, about themostspoken languages of the world.
Perhaps just because I read Babel first, but also because slightly longer chapters allow that book to delve more deeply and explain more than this one does.
Nevertheless, this is definitely a fun read for the linguistically curious!
Below, some fun facts:
Language families of Europe: IndoEuropean is the largest, and it hasextant branches.
Five major ones: Romance, Slavic, Germanic, Indic, and Iranian other sources combine these last two, And five minor: Baltic, Celtic, and then three that only have one living language apiece: Greek, Armenian, and Albanian, At least one language from each of these families is found somewhere in Europe, as Ossetian comes from the Iranian branch, and Romani from the Indic branch.
But not all European languages are IndoEuropean! Several are FinnoUgric, including Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, Maltese is Semitic. Basque is an isolate with no known living relatives,
The Balkans feature a diverse jumble of languages: the isolated Greek and Albanian, plus Bulgarian, Macedonian and SerboCroatian Slavic, plus Romanian Romance, plus Turkish.
As a result theyve picked up elements from each other: putting articles at the end of a word, avoiding infinitives, forming the future tense with a single word which coincidentally, English also does.
Icelandic has changed so little over the centuries that its speakers can still read medieval sagas for fun, a bit like the way English speakers can readth century novels.
Isolation alone doesnt do this a long history of literacy, close connectedness throughout the country, and lack of youth culture are also potential contributors,
Spoken Norwegian varies wildly over the country, though everyone manages to understand each other, And there are four candidates for the official written language!
Until around thes, Swedish had no second person singular pronoun “you” appropriate to most contexts instead, you had to address people in the third person by their name or title with appropriate degrees of respectfulness given their relative standing in relation to yours.
If you were offering the boss of your company coffee: “Would Mr, Director SoandSo like a coffee” If you were offering it to your maid: “Would Agatha like” The word “du” existed, but was only permissible in very close relationships or with children, otherwise denoting contempt.
Theyve since democratized the language to allow widespread use of du, but there are still those who would prefer another form of “you,” such as the plural, applied to more formal situations.
Ancient Greek exported words to the rest of the world, where many others used them to coin new words, with constructions that would never have been used in Greek.
Modern Greek has picked many of these up anyway, essentially borrowing the loan words back!
Many European languages make numbers very hard, essentially spelling out the addition or multiplication required to arrive at the number, which can make then calculating with it near impossible.
Celtic languages seem to have quite robust preservation and revitalization movements, compared to endangered languages in much of the rest of the world: Irish, Cornish and Manx all have people genuinely dedicated to learning and using them.
Meanwhile, Monaco has made Monegasque, a Romance language no one actually speaks anymore, mandatory in grade schools,
Esperanto is weirdly complex and difficult for a language once hoped to unite humanity, An actual linguist would probably be turned off by the superficiality of this book, but for readers with a general interest in languages it can be fun.
Every language has a history, and all have some features which seem perfectly normal to native speakers, but that come across as quirks when translated into English.
Take the case of Italian and its plethora of diminutives, pejoratives, augmentatives, and affectives, In Latin nouns had only one diminutive, so domina woman / dominula small woman, Simple enough, but the evolution to modern Italian added a number of new ones to express subtle nuances, so today there is donnina, donnetta, and donnicina.
Suffixes can even be piled on one after the other, so donnettaccia: is a woman, “ett” makes her small, and “acci” unpleasant,
English, on the other hand, has one primary diminutive: ie, as in sweet / sweetie, but there are also a number of words which started as diminutives but are no longer recognized as such, as in kitten a small cat and darling a small dear.
The author also uses the example of buttock as half of a full sized butt, but when I checked this against the word history at etymonlinedotcom I did not get that sense.
However, I found that butt in the sense of “butt heads” comes from the ProtoIndoEuropean root bhau meaning “to strike”, and is present today in words such as button, halibut, turbot, and rebut.
The fact that I find this interesting goes a long way to explaining why I was reading this book in the first place,
The book also mentions, as an aside, that Scandinavian languages do not have diminutives at all, but did not elaborate further,
And heres a random fact I found interesting: “the word million is, . . fairly young literally meaning a big thousand, it was formed by taking the Italian word for a thousand, mille, and adding the suffix one, meaning big.
”
The author complains about the multiplicity of vowel sounds in English, and he has a point: “The main nuisance about English vowels is that there are so many of them.
If youre British, youll agree that the vowels following the p are different in each item of this list: par, pear, peer, pipe, poor, power, purr, pull, poop, puke, pin, pan, pain, pen, pawn, pun, point, posh, pose, parade.
That makes twenty different vowels including the socalled gliding ones, such as oi and the long i and u, ” However, perhaps he doth protest too much, He himself is Dutch, and in Mariano Sigmans book The Secret Life of the Mind he writes that Spanish has five vowel sounds, French up to seventeen including nasals, but Dutch has forty, yes forty.
English seems like a model of simplicity by comparison,
There are sixty short chapters, each focusing on one of Europes languages, The tone is light and breezy and there are lots of interesting little factoids, For example, after giving a oneparagraph history of Malta, the author writes, “And so Malta today is a Catholic island with a Semitic hence AfroAsiatic language thats written in the Latin script unlike all other Semitic languages and looks a lot like Italian, except for the odd ż and ħ, which are typical of Polish and Serbian respectively.
” In discussing the phonetic consistency of Finnish he reminds us “Those who learn English as a foreign language are forced to grapple endlessly with its illogical rules.
Photograph is stressed on the first syllable, photography on the second and photographic on the third, Finnish, however, stresses words on the first syllable, ” Finally, the author points out something that I noticed when I reviewed an Esperanto grammar book q, v. : its not as simple and straightforward as you might have heard,
What makes Esperanto such a challenge for Anglophones First of all, it has a case system.
When a man does something in Esperanto, he is a viro: la viro vidas hundon, the man sees a dog, But when the roles are reversed, he turns into a viron: la hundo vidas viron, the dog sees a man, The dog, you will notice, undergoes the same transformation, This may not be awfully difficult, but it takes a lot of getting used to for those of us not accustomed to cases that is, nearly everyone north, west and south of Germany.
And for speakers of French, Italian and Spanish, la viro sounds plain wrong, Il viro or el viro would be OK but la viro Why the sex change
The book if full of things like that, interesting, but with no practical value unless you aspire to always be the boringest person at every party.
Wait, that reminds me: heres a completely unrelated stream of consciousness aside: in his book : In Search of the World Before the Great War, Charles Emmerson writes of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who craved adulation, that he was “a man who sought to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.
”
Each chapter ends with a footnote that shows some of the words English has picked up from the language being discussed, if any.
For instance, English added slew, galore, and trousers from Irish, but there are no loanwords from Albanian, although the note points out the countrys currency, the lek, is named after Alexander the Great.
So, this book is a lot of fun, It is a quick read, and many of its chapters are only a few pages long, so it fits easily into bitesize pieces
of reading time.
If you have a laymans interest in languages this will fit the bill nicely,
.