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Books : reviews

Gaston Dorren.
Lingo: a language spotter's guide to Europe.
Profile Books. 2015

rating : 3.5 : worth reading
review : 20 March 2022

LINGO takes us on an intriguing tour of fifty-odd European languages and dialects, from the life of PIE (our common ancestor) to the rise and rise of English, via the complexities of Welsh plurals and puzzling Czech accents. Along the way, it explains the baffling styles of Basque, unlocks Ukrainian’s enviable grammar and provides a crash course in alphabets. We learn why Esperanto could never catch on, how the language of William the Conqueror lives on in the Channel Islands, and consider if English is like Chinese.

LINGO also looks at words that English has loaned from across the continent, and those we really should import, like the Norwegians’ utepils (lager enjoyed out of doors), the Germans’ gönnen (the opposite of envy), or the Frisian tafalle (to turn out better than expected).

Surprising, witty and full of extraordinary tales, LINGO will change the way you think about the languages spoken around you.

60 short chapters give 60 views into a particular curiosity of a particular European language: of its grammar, its history, its pronunciation, its spelling, its alphabet, or some other fascinating aspect. A whirlwind tour of Europe, this builds up a lovely picture of how weird every single language is.

Gaston Dorren.
Babel: around the world in twenty languages.
Profile Books. 2018

Witty, mind-bending, and utterly fascinating, Babel follows Gaston Dorren as he sets out to explore the world’s top twenty languages. On his global tour, he calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. These range from the familiar—French, Spanish—to the surprising—Malay, Javanese, Bengali. Babel whisks the reader on a delightful journey to every continent, tracing how some languages rose to greatness while others fell away. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics or mind-bending writing scripts, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world.