Gaston Dorren's Books

Babel

Around the World in Twenty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

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Babel

Around the World in Twenty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

“Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it’s just so much fun to read.” —NPR English is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn’t speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s people in their mother tongues, you’d need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Whisking readers along on a delightful journey, he traces how these languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and shows how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics, elegant but complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to outsiders. Babel reveals why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren also shares his experiences studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten myths about Chinese characters, and discovers the region where Swahili became the lingua franca. Witty and utterly fascinating, Babel will change how you look at and listen to the world. “Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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Page Count

408

Publisher

Atlantic Monthly Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802146724

ISBN 13

9780802146724

Lingo

Around Europe in Sixty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

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Lingo

Around Europe in Sixty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into today’s remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

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Page Count

232

Publisher

Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802190944

ISBN 13

9780802190949

Lingo

Around Europe in Sixty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Lingo

Around Europe in Sixty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

Average ratings

N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

232

Publisher

Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802190944

ISBN 13

9780802190949

Babel

Around the World in Twenty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Babel

Around the World in Twenty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

408

Publisher

Atlantic Monthly Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802146724

ISBN 13

9780802146724

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