Babel: The world's twenty giant languages

Babel(Blurb) Babel is about the twenty most powerful languages of our time. Half humanity considers one of the twenty as his mother tongue. More than three-quarters of the world's population can speak at least one of 20.

Babel explores them all, from German to Japanese, from Spanish to Swahili and from Arabic to Javanese.

Babel explores one salient theme, playful and thorough ly per language.

What does it mean that Russian is 'related' to Dutch? How do the non-alphabetical writing types of China and India work? If Belgium has already struggled so much with its language issue, how can countries with far more languages save peace than ever?

Why has the colonial past made Portuguese great, but dutch didn't? Why do Japanese women talk differently than Japanese men? And why is the author thanks to this book two Vietnamese nieces richer?

Babel travels, looks at and listens to the wide world of the great languages: the letters and sounds, the culture and the conflicts, the targeted reforms and the unintended changes. Now narrative, then analyzing, but always from the same elated fascination.

 

Author: Gaston Dorren

Theme: Linguistics

Language: Dutch

Publishing: Athenaeum

Year: 2019

Number of pages: 384

ISBN: 9789025309183

Available translations: English, Spanish, Polish, Italian

Other works by the author: (1) Language Tourism, (2) Lingua, (3) Holiday in own language

Source: https://www.singeluitgeverijen.nl/athenaeum/boek/babel/


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Author: Romy Corvers

Machine translation: SDL Machine Translation (previously SDL BeGlobal)

Post-editing: No post-editing

Source language: Nederlands (nl)


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