rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Babel
    sub title: around the world in twenty languages
  name:
    name part: Dorren, Gaston
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 2018
    copyright date: 2018
    edition: First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: 360 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.
  abstract: English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it. Only one in five people does. Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 or so 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, Punjabi). This book 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 exploring tongue-tying phonetics, complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations. Each has its own customs and beliefs. Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks can't read books that are a mere seventy-five 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, 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.
  table of contents: Introduction: twenty languages: half the world -- Vietnamese, 85 million: linguistic moutaineering -- Korean, 85 million: sound and sensibility -- Tamil, 90 million: a matter of life and death -- Turkish, 90 million: irreparably improved -- Javanese, 95 million: talking up, talking down -- Persian, 110 million: empire builders and construction workers -- Punjabi, 125 million: the tone is the message -- Japanese, 130 million: linguistic gender apartheid -- Swahili, 135 million: Africa's nonchalant multilingualism -- German, 200 million: an eccentric in central Europe -- French, 250 million: death to la différence -- Malay, 275 million: the one that won -- Russian, 275 million: on being Indo-European -- Portuguese, 275 million: punching above its weight -- Bengali, 275 million: world leaders in abugidas -- Arabic, 375 million: a concise dictionary of our Arabic -- Hindi-Urdu, 550 million: always something breaking us in two -- Spanish, 575 million: ¿Ser or estar? that's the question -- Mandarin, 1.3 billion: the mythical Chinese script -- Japanese revisited: a writing system lacking in system -- English, 1.5 billion: a special lingua franca?.
  note: Gaston Dorren.
  note: "First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Profile Books"--Title page verso.
  note: Maps on endpapers.
  note: Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-347) and index.
  subject:
    topic: Linguistic geography
  subject:
    topic: Language and languages
    topic: Variation
  subject:
    topic: Philology
  subject:
    topic: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative
  classification: P375 .D67 2018
  classification: 409
  identifier: 0802128793
  identifier: 9780802128799
  record info:
    record content source: YDX
    record creation date: 180311
    record change date: 20190422104130.0
    record identifier: in00004025969