The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World (Facts on File Library of Language and Literature Series)

Rating:
Summary: With brilliant full-color photographs and maps
Review: Collaboratively compiled and edited by Bernard Comrie (Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany), Stephen Matthews (Lecturer of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong), and Maria Polinksy (Professor of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego), this newly revised edition of The Atlas Of Languages introduces readers of all backgrounds to the unique features of grammar and vocabulary found in languages around the world. Brilliant full-color photographs and maps profusely illustrate the highly descriptive and "reader friendly" text. A special look at disappearing languages rounds out this first-rate and well-rounded resource, The Atlas Of Languages is an ideal addition to any school or community library reference collection.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating!!
Review: The Atlas of Language is a good surprise for anyone interested in the origin and development of the languages of the world. I am quite familiar on many books on the subject and it is difficult to see so much good text information bundled with pictorial and graphical data of such quality and content.
Besides the basic info that all introductory books must have, "The Atlas of the Language" goes a step further, showing what is an amazingly simple and good example of a reconstructed text in Indo-european, the family of languages that generated Latin, Greek and Old Germanic, and thence English. The treatment of other families of languages, like Altaic and Uralic is quite adequate and there the reader has an almost graphic depction of the origins of modern languages like Finnish, Turkish and Corean, for example. The Semitic family of languages, from where comes Hebrew and the Arabic languages is also treated there but, in my opinion, in a way very insufficient way. Much attention is given instead to the languages of Oceania (Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia) where the great majority of the languages of today are spoken.
Also of importance are the charts that portray in a very easy manner the relationship of all the most important families of languages to the primitive family of unwritten languages spoken some 8.000 years ago!!! At the end of the book one can find a whole chapter on the story of the human alphabet, a so thrilling story that one is really glued to the text, very well written.
In my opinion, the Atlas of Languages delivers everything it promised and goes a little further, being a pretty much good book, both from the descriptive as from the written point of view.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Rating:
Summary: Poor presentation and layout - a missed opportunity
Review: The more I use this book the more disappointed by its presentation I become. I come to it, not as a language expert, but as somone who expects the information to be reasonably detailed, accurate and well presented/laid out. The authors are clearly knowledgeable on their subject and there is a lot of good information in there but accuracy and detail have been sacrificed for a presentation which is muddled and "space hungry" eg
a. All the maps adopt a strange "jig-saw cut out" pseudo 3 dimensional convention by which coasts on one side are shown as "cliffs" in a different colour. Since the maps rely on colour as a means of differentiating language locations this justs muddles the picture. In any case why do it - it adds absolutely nothing and can only remove accuracy!
b. Yet there is often little or no real attempt at accuracy when it comes to showing language locations with languages often magically following international boundaries. eg on page 41 Belgium is shown as being completely Flemish speaking!!
c.Space is wasted on totally extraneous information - eg half of page 53 is taken up with a picture of some fir trees and an icy river with the statement that this is "a view of the Siberian Yenisei river where the isolated language Ket is spoken". Yet we are told NOTHING more about "Ket" other than its family and that it is "isolated". It isn't even mentioned on the page with the map of Eurasia which supposedly covers the Yenisei area - on which this river is not even shown!! So much for this being an "Atlas"!!
d. There are plain "errors" - eg the map of "Minority Languages" on page 213 has a pointer referring to Gascon which is aimed at the Basque area
e. Yet, on the other hand, "conventions" which may be commonplace among language experts are adopted without explanation (there is a thin 1 page glossary of language terms) eg the use of something akin to "?" after a Chinese word (but not on words of other languages in the chart which mean the same - so does it show "tone"?) on page 28 which appears again on page 38 in front of an "Afro-Asiatic word "?amen = remain". so what does it mean there?
f. The use of colour is totally over the top! Charts are often shown in poor colour combinations for reading - eg black print on blue background (pages 136/7). All the maps in the section on S and S.E Asia adopt a yellow background for seas/oceans -possibly because this is the "signal" colour for this chapter (ie it is adopted at every opportunity for backgrounds, print fonts and charts). Luckily this is the only geographical area so treated and we do not have to put up with Purple seas for the Pacific or Green seas for Europe!! So why do it for that 1 chapter??

Regarding "completeness" the authors "excuse" themselves in the introduction "since it is not feasible to give the locations ..of all 6000 or so languages ..... the maps show only major languages or those .... mentioned in the text" My wife and I have just returned from a holiday in Guyana where we stayed with some Amerindians and I immediately looked up their language "Makushi". Not a mention. Was I just unlucky? But I look at all that "waste space"

I guess for the price and given the competition this book is Ok but there is still an opportunity for a good, adult Atlas of Language!