 |
| UK subtitle? I don't know |
Oooh, languages! I love languages and their weird quirks. As a teenager I wanted to learn a lot of them, and I did try--but it's not as easy as I wish it were!
Dorren is Dutch, which gives him a little different perspective. It's refreshing for me. And this is a fun little book; it's not a big serious treatment of European languages, but a little dip into the qualities or oddities of each one. Every language gets a short chapter, and he talks about whatever he feels like talking about. That might be a historical anecdote, an unusual grammatical feature, or the subtleties of what makes a dialect. I expected the Danish chapter to maybe talk about articles (which are stuck on to the end of a word, and he talks about that feature in...Hungarian maybe?), but instead it was about the history of how Danish hegemony shrank down to almost nothing.
There are languages here that nobody really speaks any more (Dalmatian), languages resurrected to a new life (Manx, Cornish, and others), languages you've never heard of (Sorbian, Monegasque, Gagauz), sign languages, and even Esperanto. And the final chapter, on English, is titled "the global headache."
It is all very fun. This is a great book to keep for reading over lunch, or dipping into at random. I learned a bunch of neat things and enjoyed myself the whole time.
0 Yorumlar