The Languages of the World

Rating:
Summary: Can Tell You A Lot About Languages--And The World
Review: Kenneth Katzner provides a well written and concisely presented book for those interested in the world's languages, their origins, growth and transformations, and linguistic relatives. The languages are listed by familial grouping, then individual languages, and then nation by nation. Easy-to-read charts elucidating families, sub-groups, branches, and major and minor languages are listed in the front of the book. Individually, the languages are listed in the index in the back of the book in alphabetical order making them easy to find and cross-reference. One can quickly find which languages are related via sub-families. You can bounce around from page to page with this.

Each language listed is presented with a sample such as a poem or proverb followed by an English transliteration. Also included is the number of people who speak it, and in what different parts of the world. The languages' family, idiocyncracies, major grammar points, alphabet, and stresses are noted. As an example, here's a paraphrase of the Finnish language presented in the book:

Spoken by 5 million speakers in Finland, 70,000 in the U.S., 200,000 in Sweden and 50,000 in Russia. Finnish is one of the few languages in Europe that is not of the Indo-European languages family. Like Estonian, it belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages which are a branch derived from the Uralic family. Finnish is difficult language to learn for Western native speakers because of it's non Indo-European origins and the the fact that it has 15 noun cases.

Also in the beginning is a biography of the families of languages and explanations of the migrations of people, many thousands of years ago, that has created the current multi-varied linguistic make up of our world today.

Rating:
Summary: Should be called alphabets of the world
Review: This book is almost useless unless you like looking at foreign alphabets without understanding the smallest thing about the languages that use them. Katzner gives you a sample passage of a language in its native script with an English translation, but does nothing to impart a sense of what the language actually means or how it sounds. So, unless you can actually read the Cyrillic, Arabic or Hanggul scripts , or know the witings used to represent Buginese, Burmese, Tamil, Sanskrit or dozens of others, you know next to nothing about the language itself. There are no grammatical data given, nor any sense of how each language expresses itself. One mistake he makes over and over is confusing letters and sounds - the two are not the same, but Katzner doesn't seem to realize it.

So if you want to look at Tibetan and say to yourself, "Gee, that's a nice looking bit of writing", this is a good book for you. If you have any linguistic training, this will be a nice curiousity on yor shelf. If you want to know more about Tibetan (or any of the other languages included), it will be a disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: Good Reference Book
Review: This is one of the books that started up my love for languages when I was younger.

The sections are categorized by geographic area. In each section a language is given its native script(s) then a translation in English. Following the two is a brief history and/or description of the language with information on how many people speak it and where.

I only have a couple minor complaints. One is that some scripts don't reflect the way they're used now or not written as they should be, such as Greek (they eliminated many diacritics) and Hawaiian (missing macrons). The other is the chart of language families. Some headings are incorrect, like refering to the languages of the Philippines as part of the Indonesian branch!

Despite those errors, I think this a good reference.. Especially if you come across a script you're unfamiliar with, you can compare it with those in the book. But don't expect to learn anything about the grammar or how to write the script.