Babel ― Around the World in Twenty Languages

ISBN13：9780802128799
出版社：Atlantic Monthly Pr
作者：Gaston Dorren
裝訂／頁數：精裝／320頁
規格：22.9cm*14.6cm*3.2cm (高/寬/厚)
出版日：2018/12/04
關鍵字： Babel ― Around the World in Twenty Languages、 Babel、 Around、 the、 World、 in、 Twenty、 Languages、 Atlantic Monthly Pr、 Gaston Dorren、外文書、 Dialectology & historicl linguistics、

杜威圖書分類： Dialectology & historicl linguistics

定價：NT$ 875 元

優惠價：79 折 691 元

領券後再享88折

領

無庫存，下單後進貨(到貨天數約30-45天)

可得紅利積點：20 點

相關商品

商品簡介

作者簡介

商品簡介

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, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He investigates these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Tamil, Bengali). Babel whisks the reader on a delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. From tongue-tying phonetics to elegant but confusing writing scripts, and mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel is a testament to the idea of Charlemagne’s that “to speak another language is to possess another soul.”

Among many other things, Babel will teach you why Russian has no word for blue, how and why Turkish stopped borrowing words from other languages, and why Arabic might be the hardest language to learn. Dorren forecasts the future of Chinese script, re-examines the Latin alphabet’s gory past, and explains why you have to be very careful not to offend someone when speaking Javanese, which offers a choice of five different registers or khrong for most words in the language, depending on the social class of the person being addressed. Not a language for the faint-hearted. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, and a lot easier than learning twenty languages, Babel will change the way you look at the world and how it speaks.

作者簡介

Gaston Dorren is a linguist, journalist, and polyglot. He speaks Dutch, Limburgish, English, German, French, and Spanish, and reads nine more languages. He is the author of Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages, as well as two books in Dutch and the app, The Language Lover’s Guide to Europe. Dorren lives in the Netherlands.