Gaston Dorren

Lingo

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Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal).
Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences.
Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes 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 this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).
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303 printed pages
Original publication
2015
Publication year
2015
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  • MVshared an impression4 years ago
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Quotes

  • hrbhas quoted6 years ago
    The core of the controversy can be summed up in one question: how Danish should Norwegian be? This issue has been hotly contested for some two hundred years. In 1814 Norway broke away from Denmark, becoming effectively an independent nation, though full and official independence didn’t come until 1905. But there was a problem. Under Danish rule, the Norwegian language, which in the Middle Ages had set the tone in all of Northern Europe, had been squeezed into a tight cor
  • hrbhas quoted6 years ago
    Cyrillic script, discussed in the previous chapter, and which is used not just in Russian but also in Bulgarian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Ossetian, Serbo-Croatian (in part, anyway) and Belarusian
  • hrbhas quoted6 years ago
    the ‘hard sign’ is even more marginal, and is usually left out when transcribing Russian into the Latin alphabet. The soft and hard signs together are called the two yers.
    Group 2: sibilants (hissing noises)
    This is where things get really Slavic. Most of these letters are derived from the Glagolitic alphabet (see p.245).
    Ц (TS) as in tsunami. In many languages ‘ts’ is perceived as one sound. In German it’s written as z, in Czech and Hungarian as c.
    Ч (CH) as in chicken.
    Ж (ZH) sounds like the middle consonant in measure.
    Ш (SH) as in bush or shirt.
    Щ (SHTSH) in spite of the five-character transcription, in modern Russian it sounds like a long ‘sh’, as in bush-shirt.
    Group 3: the ‘mirrored R’
    Я (YA) as in yard. Though at least two Cyrillic letters (Э and Ю) underwent mirroring at some point in history, Я did not originate as a mir

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