English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it - only one in five people does. This book is about the other four.
Babel delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of a dozen of the most widely-spoken languages in the world, taking the reader on a delightful journey across every continent, tracing their languages' origins in the deep past and tracking their bloody rise to greatness. Along the way it listens to their utterly un-English sounds and looks at their bewildering array of scripts. It presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies, their inventive coinages and surprising loans. And it looks at their grammars, which order their speakers' worldview but often appear bafflingly complex to outsiders.
Learn why Russian has no word for blue, how Turkish stopped borrowing words from other languages and why Arabic might be the hardest one to learn. Look into the future of Chinese script and re-examine the Latin alphabet's gory past. Consider the difficulties of having four forms for 'I' as in Vietnamese, and the questions that arise from the way Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart from all other entities.
Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at the world and how it speaks.
