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Loading... Empires of the Word: A Language History of the Worldby Nicholas Ostler
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  hailelib | Sep 5, 2009 |  A history of the world's major languages and how they have spread over the past few thousand years. Looks to be a delightful work. 1  Fledgist | Mar 25, 2008 | Tour de force! Not a perfect book, no, but only in the sense that nothing is perfect in this imperfectest of all worlds. He drops in and out of giving those all-important pronunciation guides, which start out making the book seem so immaculate. And the whole project of "world language history" is so macro that the later chapters, on French and Russian and English especially, have a bit of a survey-of-familiar-ground-with-tidbits feel. But these are small, not to say churlish, objections. This book is huge, with amazing sweep. It provides a theoretical framework that is fresh and of utility to the scholar as well as the armchair historian and/or pedant. It gives you the joy of getting new sounds and strange civilizations into your head, helps you understand the contingencies and the might-have-beens, and delivers up worlds beyond your imagination. And hell, I like the linguistic essentialism of "Arabic’s austere grandeur and egalitarianism; Chinese and Egyptian’s unshakeable self-regard; Sanskrit’s luxuriating classifications and hierarchies; Greek’s self-confident innovation leading to self-obsession and pedantry; Latin’s civic sense; Spanish rigidity, cupidity, and fidelity; French admiration for rationality; and English admiration for business acumen," and if that makes me a shameless modernist, well, (it doesn't, but) so be it. This book makes me feel very good about an MA in English language, and I learned a lot more along with the affirmation than I would have from Paolo Coelho or "Tuesdays with Morrie." (  )5 booksfallapart | Aug 18, 2007 |  nishaspillai | Jul 13, 2007 | Didn't hold my interest. Stopped reading. (  ) aneel | May 10, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it.
Yet the history of the world's great languages has been very little told. Empires of the Word, by the wide-ranging linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations in education, culture, and diplomacy devised by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English.
Besides these epic ahievements, language failures are equally fascinating: Why did German get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, though the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India?
As this book splendidly and authoritatively reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real character of peoples; and, for all the recent tehnical mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term preeminence. The language future, like the language past, will be full of surprises.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400)
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Highly recommended.