If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel you could talk with three
quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's
estimated 6 500 tongues?Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and
extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas tracing their origins and their
sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts presents
the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains
how their grammars order their speakers' worldview. Combining linguistics and cultural history
Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world addressing such questions as how tiny
Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't why Japanese women talk differently
from men what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English and how non-alphabetic scripts
such as those of India and China do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention the
conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I' or how Tamil pronouns keep humans and
deities apart.Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.
