Lingo (2018)

by Gaston Dorren

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"Spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences ... [and taking] 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 conversation"--Amazon.com.… (more)

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Showing 1-5 of 13 (next | show all)

Interesting book. If you like languages and/or linguistics, you will like this book. The book has 60 chapters and each one tells a story or anecdote about a different Indo-European language. There were several languages that I had never heard of before. My only wish would be that it included a few non-Indo-European languages such as Arabic, Coptic and Egyptian. Would have loved to see what he would have discovered about them. Highly recommend this book. (

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Nefersw | Jan 14, 2022 |

A good book for any amateur language lover/linguist.

The section on Esperanto was a little pessimistic and maybe not entirely correct, but hey I'm no Esperantist... Since I read the Norwegian translation it could just have been a weird translation that skewed some original sense of humour.

Otherwise a good read indeed.
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arthurnoerve | Sep 19, 2021 |

A literal crash course on all languages you may find in Europe. Very, very easy to read and understand, except for a few chapters heavy in grammar, but otherwise a fast, enjoyable read. Would have appreciated more thorough information, but otherwise it’s a great first book if you’re looking into learning about the language diversity in the European continent. (

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carrotchimera | Jun 29, 2020 |

A fun little book. A trip through all the European languages using each one to illustrate language families, how they evolved, how they influenced each other and the many oddities and similarities between them. Not an in-depth analysis by any means, but full of interesting points and well written. (

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espadana | Apr 29, 2019 |

Excellent and fun look at European languages. We learnt all sorts of things about how different languages work that I wish I could now remember. I do now know why Scottish mountains are so difficult to pronounce and wonder if anyone can get it right. This is a well written (as you would expect) and engaging book covering all sorts of European languages. (

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CarolKub | Nov 3, 2017 |

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Are some languages worse than others? The question might sound silly, but in this entertaining exercise in "language tourism" (the book's original Dutch title), the author isn't frightened of making judgments. He thinks lenition – the habit in Welsh of "changing a word's first letter for no apparent reason" – is just "mindboggling", and generally that "Gaelic spelling is flawed … wasteful, arcane and outdated". The "ludicrous" variety of cases in Slovak amounts to "chaos", while Breton's system of naming numbers makes mental arithmetic unnecessarily difficult.

In the author's native Dutch, the gendering of nouns is changing in what he calls "a blatant act of linguistic sexism". (Everything that is not obviously a female living thing is a "he".) Nor will Anglophone readers of this edition feel smug after Dorren's excellent dissection of the illogicality of English, with its 20 different vowel sounds, impossible spelling and idiosyncratic formations. (Very reasonably, Dorren wonders: "Why does English say 'I want you to listen' rather than the more straightforward 'I want that you listen'?")

added by Cynfelyn | editGuardian, Steven Poole (Nov 28, 2014)

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Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
Dorren, Gaston	—	primary author	all editions	confirmed
Edwards, Alison	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

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Lingo by Gaston Dorren

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Lingo by Gaston Dorren

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Canonical title

Lingo

Original title

Lingua

Alternative titles

Original publication date

2018

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Epigraph

"Two languages in one head? No one can live at that speed! Good Lord, man, you're asking the impossible." " But the Dutch speak four languages and they smoke marijuana." "Yes, but that's cheating." —Eddie Izzard 'Dress to Kill'

Dedication

First words

Introduction
The attitude of English speakers to foreign languages can be summed up thus: let's plunder, not learn them.

Once upon a time, thousands of years ago (nobody knows quite when), in a faraway land (nobody knows quite where), there was a language that no one speaks today and whose name has been forgotten, if it ever had one.

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Disambiguation notice

Information from the Dutch Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.

herziene en uitgebreide uitgave van Taaltoerisme

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Blurbers

Original language

Dutch

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▾Book descriptions

"Spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences ... [and taking] 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 conversation"--Amazon.com.

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Book description

Surprising, witty and full of extraordinary tales, LINGO will change the way you think about the languages spoken around you. 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 ways 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 Norwegian 'utepils' (lager enjoyed out of doors), the Germans' 'goennen' (the opposite of envy) or the frisian 'tafalle' (to turn out better than expected.)

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