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Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (2005)

de Nicholas Ostler

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1,7083410,104 (3.99)81
An offbeat natural history of language takes readers from the educational and cultural innovators of Sumeria, to the resilience of Chinese, to the global spread of English, in a volume that offers linguistic perspectives on numerous past and present civilizations.
Adicionado recentemente porcdstephens, eol, mcginleyfamily, biblioteca privada, Black.Opium, comptron, TeamRude, icepatton
  1. 30
    In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth de J. P. Mallory (timspalding)
  2. 10
    The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World de David W. Anthony (timspalding)
  3. 13
    The Story of Spanish de Jean-Benoît Nadeau (lorax)
    lorax: "Empires of the Word" is a history of a dozen or so languages shaping history, including Spanish; "The Story of Spanish" is the same idea, less academically and obviously in more detail, focused on Spanish. Both are highly recommended.
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Mostrando 1-5 de 33 (seguinte | mostrar todas)
Easily one of the most intensely researched popular science books I've ever read (it's right up there with Jared Diamond's works in terms of endless footnotes and works cited), this is an impressively sweeping overview of the history of a dozen of the world's major languages and language families that manages to be interesting even when he's talking about stuff like the developmental similarities between Chinese and ancient Egyptian, or how people decided to use ancient languages like Akkadian and Sanskrit as lingua francas, or why Dutch didn't catch on as a colonial language. I personally find language history and usage fascinating (nerd alert), so maybe not everyone will find this book as cool as I did, but this was one of those books where I learned something new on basically every page and enjoyed doing it. Ostler's ability to synthesize vast amounts of research is awe-inspiring, and his obvious love for certain languages (he has a real crush on Sanskrit, in particular) carries over to the subject material in ways that only the best authors manage. He has some really interesting insights on all sorts of things, like why Germanic tribes managed to conquer half the Roman Empire but didn't impose their languages anywhere whereas the Arab conquests only a few hundred years later led to permanent linguistic change across almost all of their territories, and his ending discussion of the evolution and future of English is probably worth the price of the book right there. ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
An interesting linguistic history of some of the world's biggest languages — why they rose, why some of them fell, and why they didn't experience other paths. Full of interesting tidbits, such as the surprising persistence of indigenous languages in the Spanish North American colonies we think of as monolithically Spanish-language today, or the question of why some languages (English, Mandarin, French) spread while others (German, Russian) don't even when speakers of those languages exert political and military control. (Speakers of Germanic languages overran the entire western Roman Empire; in no place but Britain did a Germanic language take outside of Germania.)

Only at the very end of the book does Ostler step back from his survey of major languages to try to draw systematic lessons about why some languages succeed and others don't. It was interesting and tantalizingly brief, and I wanted to know more. ( )
  dhmontgomery | Dec 13, 2020 |
I bought this thinking it would be philological in nature, but it turned out to be something else entirely; a history of the spread (and decline in many cases) of the use of major languages throughout history. Traditional philology gets only fleeting mentions. If the author is to be believed, such a thing has never been attempted before.

Hence I was less interested than I had hoped, but that isn't the fault of the author - and I wasn't totally uninterested, either. Parts of the book, mainly those overlapping with pre-existing interests of mine, were fascinating, other parts were a bit of a grind. The basic idea of examining how conventional historical processes (e.g. military, colonial, mercantile, migrational, religious, technological) impact the use, spread and decline of languages did seem interesting and original, particularly the generalising conclusions but, oddly, they come before the detailed exposition they are derived from.

Strongly recommended to history buffs - not so much to anybody else.
( )
  Arbieroo | Jul 17, 2020 |
Fascinating look at languages through history which spread because other people wanted or had to learn them such as Chinese, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Greek, and Spanish. After looking at why different languages persisted in being spoken by a large number of people over a wide area, the author tries to predict whether English is here to stay as the current no. 1 international language. ( )
  Robertgreaves | Aug 16, 2019 |
Oh dear--I had such high hopes--and I really do love the occasional academic treatise. This just wasn't compelling, despite in the abstract sounding like a slam dunk for me. Eventually I realised one day I will die, and I'd rather have read something else. It's really, really specific, technical, and historical, and despite all the drama and romance that the subject could have had, it was about as gripping as reading about how General Motors occasionally changed their car designs, and how. No, not even car designs, less interesting, um, let's say how they changed their engine. That sort of thing. I think there's a nice opportunity for somebody to write a 250 pager on the same topic, but with more general appeal. ( )
  ashleytylerjohn | Sep 19, 2018 |
Mostrando 1-5 de 33 (seguinte | mostrar todas)
It’s a history of all languages – some have called it a macro-history. The ambition of this book is really extraordinary. There have been lots of histories of English, and there are lots of histories of other languages in those languages, but actually to try and write a history of the whole of language is an incredibly audacious thing, and Ostler pulls it off.
 
A marvelous book, learned and instructive.
 
This is a great book. After reading it you will never think of language in the same way again - and you will probably think of the world, and its future, in a rather different way too.
 
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An offbeat natural history of language takes readers from the educational and cultural innovators of Sumeria, to the resilience of Chinese, to the global spread of English, in a volume that offers linguistic perspectives on numerous past and present civilizations.

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