Gaston Dorren Book order

Three-quarters of the world can speak the twenty languages discussed in Babel. But what makes them stand out amid our other six thousands tongues? And will English, with its 1.5 billion speakers, forever keep its slot at number one, or eventually fade away like Latin? Gaston Dorren delves deep into the extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their politics 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; and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our twenty-six letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart, and why we all know more Korean and Arabic than we imagine. Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.

Whether you're a frequent visitor to Europe or just an armchair traveler, the surprising and extraordinary stories in "Lingo" will forever change the way you think about the continent, and may even make you want to learn a new language. "Lingo" spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent's ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. "Lingo" takes us into today's remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word "you" in conversation, leading to tiptoeing questions of the form: "Would herr generaldirektor Rexed like a biscuit?" Spanning six millenia and sixty languages in bite-size chapters, "Lingo" is a hilarious and highly edifying exploration of how Europe speaks."