Lingo - Around Europe in Sixty Languages, by Gaston Dorren, is a book on linguistics. Before you turn your nose up, however, let me tell you that it is a very well-written and interesting book on linguistics. Oh, alright, sometimes the author gets down in the weeds of some concept that's really too detailed (at least for me), but most of the time it's fascinating to see how languages have diverged from, converged on, borrowed from and competed with each other. Did you know, for example, that "if you know one Slavic language, you know a whole bunch of them - the only problem is, often you don't know which one it is that you know," or that "Turkish is a bit of an introvert," or that French has a mother fixation on Latin, or that 200 million people in India speak languages that have nothing to do with the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root? Cool.
The last chapter, aptly named The Global Headache, deals with English and Chinese. Dorren makes the case that English resembles Chinese in some respects: (1) hard to pronounce, (2) the written language gives no clue to the spoken, particularly given the various dialects, and (3) the lack of inflections (word bits added to clarify meaning, for example larger and largest) makes them a little easier to learn than some of the other possible world languages.
Each short chapter (and there are a lot of them...the book is 304 pages long and has 60 chapters) ends with a note on a specific word that has entered our language, as well as another word that probably should because there isn't a good way of expressing it in English. The book has both a reading list and a thorough index as well.
Highly recommended.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley in return for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.
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