|
Today's transit trip took hours longer than expected (in my more paranoid moments I suspect the new bus schedules to be exquisitely timed to pull into the station just as one's connection is pulling out, so that the cost of an extra transfer will be needed), so I was able to both start and finish Gaston Dorren's Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe, which I picked up on sale from Kobo last year, which turns out to be an adapted partial translation of his Dutch-language Taaltoerisme (Language Tourism, according to the acknowledgements in the back) with some added material to make it more appealing to English-speakers.
This was a nice, light overview of the characteristic features and distinctive quirks of various European languages (both as families and dialects), with a greater amount of depth than I was expecting. While brief, each topic provided rather a lot of interesting trivia and explanations for how the assorted languages got to be the way they were, in terms of local dominance, isolated development, etc., as well regular end-pieces on loan-words contributed to English, and a selected single word from each language that expresses a useful concept that doesn't exist or takes an entire phrase in English, such as madárlátta from Hungarian, which means “food taken for an outing but brought back home uneaten”.
A lot of fairly obscure languages get their own chapter, such as Sorbian (not a typo for Serbian) and Galician (ancestor of Portuguese), and the book overall is divided into nicely thematic sections which group together endangered languages that have had modern revival attempts of varying success (Manx, Monégasque), languages that have had significant reforms which totally changed some aspect or other (post-Ottoman Empire Turkey dropping the actual Ottoman language which was an artificial conglomerate used by officials and also switching to a Latin-based alphabet), languages that have had basically one person guiding and strongly influencing its future (apparently the low phonetic correspondence of Farøese can be blamed on one man during the 19th century, who thought it should be spelt as his ancestors spelt it and not as the language was actually pronounced by then), and other common factors.
While it generally provides a light overview of most topics, there's a few it goes into rather a lot of depth upon. I knew that Swedish had some argument over its recent adoption of hen as a gender-neutral 3rd person pronoun, but I had no idea there was such a dispute over ni as an old-fashioned 2nd person formal pronoun that some groups are advocating a return to (and pre-1960s, a very complicated system of polite address that seems to have been a social minefield). And it turns out that the Sami reindeer-herding indigenous people actually have more words that technically refer to forms of snow than the Inuit do (the assertion that they had dozens having long since been debunked). These more focused essay-ettes give this a nice touch of added-value beyond being a pleasant “lite” trivia reference book.
Recommended for anyone interested in language and linguistics-related trivia. I bought this expecting to like it because this is the type of book and topic that I'm already inclined towards, but I ended up enjoying it even more than I'd thought I would. The ebook version is pretty nicely done. There's an actual index in the back with working links to pages with the various mentions of a given subject, the few footnotes mostly work (I think there were one or two that weren't linked properly, but they were all visible at the end of chapter), and the author includes an annotated further reading list in the back, which is always welcome.
|