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Dorren, Gaston.
Subjects
Linguistic geography.
Language and languages -- Variation.
Philology.
Browse Catalog
by author:
Dorren, Gaston.
by title:
Babel : around the w...
by call number:
409 D716b
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Dorren, Gaston.
Linguistic geography.
Language and languages -- Variation.
Philology.
MARC Display
Babel
:
around
the
world
in
twenty
languages
/ Gaston Dorren.
by
Dorren, Gaston.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018.
Call #:
409 D716b
Subjects
Linguistic geography.
Language and
languages
-- Variation.
Philology.
ISBN:
9780802128799 (hardcover)
0802128793 (hardcover)
Edition:
1st Grove Atlantic hardcover ed.
Description:
360 p. : ill., maps, portraits, charts ; 23 cm
Notes:
Maps on end-papers.
Bibliography:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:
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.
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.
Holds:
0
Copy/Holding information
Location
Collection
Call No.
Item type
Status
Central Library
Adult Nonfiction
409 D716b
Adult books
Checked in
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Central Library
Adult Nonfiction
409 D716b
Core Collection - Adult
Checked in
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