Gaston Dorren's Babel

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tungemål
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Gaston Dorren's Babel

Postby tungemål » Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:54 am

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

I'm reading this book in German, partly to improve my German, partly because I'm interested in the subject matter. It explain some linguistics, history and culture of the 20 biggest languages of the world.

Did you read it?

The first chapter is on Vietnamese, and mostly explains what makes Vietnamese hard for a European to learn. Interesting for me since I don't know any Vietnamese, but that Vietnamese would be foreign and hard to learn comes as no surprise to me.

The next chapter is about Korean, and it explains a very interesting concept that I didn't know about: Korean and some other languages has a feature called ideophones. That is, certain sounds of a word invoke certain meanings, not arbitrarily but through an intuitive sound-meaning association. You need to read the chapter to understand this, but this is apparantly a full-blown system in Korean.
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Re: Gaston Dorren's Babel

Postby chove » Sun Oct 24, 2021 12:10 pm

I'm reading it at the moment (in English) and it's really interesting! I like how it gets into different aspects of language with the hook of whichever particular language he's discussing.
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Re: Gaston Dorren's Babel

Postby AroAro » Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:02 am

Yes, I read it a few months ago (in Polish) and liked it a lot. The most interesting chapter for me was on Turkish - I didn't know that this language changed so drastically in the last century. I'm looking forward to reading Dorren's "Lingo" as well.
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Re: Gaston Dorren's Babel

Postby IronMike » Mon Nov 01, 2021 10:59 pm

How interesting. I just finished his Lingo; I had issues with it but all in all liked it. Didn't research any of his other books, but will put this on my TBR list. Thank you!

Edit: Let me add that since adding (and then reading) Lingo to my Goodreads page, I get many, I mean MANY, book recommendations from GR on linguistics topics, but in Polish! (Isn't he Dutch?)
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Re: Gaston Dorren's Babel

Postby tungemål » Tue Nov 30, 2021 9:02 am

I read a few more chapters of Babel. All are interesting.

On Persian:
This is one of the chapters that combines language, history, and society, and I think those chapters are the most successful. The chapter made me interested in reading more about the Persian empire(s).

On Russian:
I do like nerdy language details on grammar, etymology, and so on. Especially interesting aspects of languages that I don't know, and the Korean chapter was very good. The Russian chapter was a bit disappointing though. He dives into etymology and the Indo-European cognates, which is interesting for us language nerds. But I feel he could have found many other focuses for this chapter. For instance, how Russian reformed to take up old church slavonic. The history of early slavic tribes and how the slavic languages diverged. Or the Soviet era and its language policies.

On English:
This chapter was very good. He points out that the English dominance as an international language is surprisingly recent. He explains why English is not so easy to learn as native speakers might think - both in regards to pronunciation and grammer. And finally he considers the future of English as an international language - without giving a conclusion, but presenting very interesting scenarios.
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