Гастон Доррен — новинки

В своей новой книге нидерландский полиглот и лингвист Гастон Доррен освещает особенности 20 самых распространенных языков мира из их шеститысячного легиона — от вьетнамского до английского. И если в первой его книге, «Лингво», ставшей мировым бестселлером, рассматривались лишь европейские языки, то «Вавилон» идет дальше. Если выучить все языки, о которых подробно…

A quirky language-lovers tour of the twenty most-spoken languages in the world - what puts them a cut above the other six thousand?
If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues?
Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview.
Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', or how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart.
Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.

English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn’t speak it―only one in five people does. Dorren 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. He sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French,…

С лингвистической точки зрения Европа – это языковой пирог, который состоит из нескольких больших кусков, множества мелких и горстки крошек. Устное и письменное многообразие языков нашего континента выглядит впечатляюще и невероятно увлекательно. «Лингво» – это языковой пейзаж нашего континента, живописные лингвистические реалии которого достойны пристального…

Welcome to Europe as you've never known it before, seen through the peculiarities of its languages and dialects. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Gaston Dorren takes us on an intriguing tour of the continent, from Proto-Indo-European (the common ancestor of most European languages) to the rise and rise of English, via the complexities of Welsh plurals and…