Empires of the Word
A Language History of the World
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3.9 • 8 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ostler's ambitious and accessible book is not a technical linguistic study i.e., it's not concerned with language structure but about the "growth, development and collapse of language communities" and their cultures. Chairman of the Foundation of Endangered Languages, Ostler's as fascinated by extinction as he is by survival. He thus traces the fortunes of Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic in the flux of ancient Middle Eastern military empires. Ancient Egyptian's three millennia of stability compares with the longevity of similarly pictographic Chinese and provides a cautionary example: even a populous, well-defined linguistic community can vanish. In all cases, Ostler stresses the role of culture, commerce and conquest in the rise and fall of languages, whether Spanish, Portuguese and French in the Americas or Dutch in Asia and Africa. The rise of English to global status, Ostler argues, owes much to the economic prestige of the Industrial Revolution, but its future as a lingua franca may falter on demographic trends, such as booming birth rates in China. This stimulating book is a history of the world as seen through the spread and demise of languages. Maps.
Customer Reviews
Amazing book !
This is a must read book if you like languages, history, literature, poetry.
Incoherent and prosaic
To start off, I really wanted to like this book. It had an interesting premise about exploring reasons for language spread, and I thought the language examples were interesting at first. But the more I read this book, the more it read like a series of facts than as a coherent argument with evidence. The writing style is heavily prosaic and textbook-like, and sometimes the topics don’t flow well together. Even as someone who’s extremely interested in languages, I found myself bored by this book.
The book itself is very unfinished. I found myself doubting the author when he mentioned questionable concepts like Altaic languages, and I found his bias to be evident when reading the book (such as when he called French “slack pronunciation” of Latin or when he talked about people avidly accepting “re-education” in English). I found that this kind of writing made me take the author less seriously. By the time I made it to the English chapter, I became convinced that the author didn’t take the time to edit and fact check the book thoroughly. The text itself is also formatted poorly for the e-book version.
Even if you’re interested in languages or linguistics, I’d recommend not reading this book.