Babel

Synopsis

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.

Summary

Chapter 1: Linguistics, Babel, and the Ancient World

* Introduction to linguistics, the study of human language.
* The Babel myth and its interpretations as a metaphor for linguistic diversity.
* Ancient civilizations and their contributions to language study, including the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks.

Chapter 2: The Renaissance and the Quest for a Universal Language

* The rise of humanism and the search for a common language that would unify Europe.
* The writings of Thomas More, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Francis Bacon on the need for a universal language.
* Attempts to create artificial languages, such as Esperanto and Volapük.

Example: Esperanto, an artificial language created by Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887, is designed to be easy to learn and to serve as a neutral medium of communication.

Chapter 3: The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution

* The development of scientific methods and their application to language study.
* The emergence of comparative linguistics and the discovery of language families.
* The work of linguists such as William Jones, Franz Bopp, and the Grimm brothers on Indo-European languages.

Example: The Grimm's Law, formulated by Jacob Grimm, describes the sound shifts that occurred in the transition from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic languages.

Chapter 4: The 19th Century and the Rise of Comparative Linguistics

* The expansion of colonial empires and the need for language learning and translation.
* The establishment of the discipline of comparative linguistics and the development of new methods for analyzing language structure.
* The work of August Schleicher, Karl Brugmann, and Ferdinand de Saussure on language evolution and grammatical analysis.

Example: The Proto-Indo-European language, reconstructed through comparative linguistics, is the hypothetical ancestor of all Indo-European languages.

Chapter 5: The 20th Century and the Structuralist Revolution

* The emergence of structuralism as a dominant school of linguistics in the early 20th century.
* Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between langue and parole, and his emphasis on the sign as the basic unit of language.
* The development of phonemics, morphology, and syntax as subfields of linguistics.

Example: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a standardized system of symbols used to represent the sounds of human languages.

Chapter 6: The 21st Century and the Cognitive Revolution

* The shift towards cognitive linguistics and the study of language as a mental phenomenon.
* The influence of neuroscience, psychology, and computer science on linguistic research.
* Developments in language acquisition, language processing, and language disorders.

Example: The theory of Universal Grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky, argues that all human languages share a set of innate principles that govern their structure.