Customer Reviews

The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although this book makes interesting reading for almost anyone interested in languages and their interrelationships, I was upset by some errors I noticed. In the section devoted to South America one reads that countries of that part of the world are not linguistic homogeneous. Since more than 99.5 % of the inhabitants of Brazil (the most populous country of the region) have Portuguese as their native language, and more than 99 % of Argentineans (the second most populous country) speak Spanish, that statement is simply not true. It seems the authors simply looked at some South American countries and then generalized the findings to all others. In the section devoted to Africa one finds a picture that should portrait a classroom at a fundamental school in a French speaking country. The sentences on the blackboard are written in Portuguese! I could find these errors easily since I am Brazilian and speak Portuguese. I wonder how many more I simply accepted as truths. By the way, that picture could simply have been omitted since, like most of the other pictures of this book, it is non-informative and superfluous.

I have often thought that such a language tool should be written; now I think it needs an editor. The book was a fine effort, but, nebulous linguistic boundaries aside, the book presented as fact statements that simply are not true. For example, the Irish "O", seen on so many surnames, does not mean "son of," as the book states, but rather "grandson of." Unfortunately, this is only one example of faulty research. The book is well researched in its presentation of grammar forms and linguistic boundaries (making for a good atlas), but the faulty research and questionable timelines ruin the finished product. Caveat: this book should only be used by linguists who will recognize errors when they come across them; a non-linguist might become seriously impaired in further linguistic research by this book.

I was really looking forward to seeing this book (my sister ordered it for me for Christmas as I have no credit card), but I was very disappointed in the cheesy kiddie graphics of the maps and in the irrelevant space-filling color photos, most of which have little to do with any serious consideration of the topic at hand. The text is also filled with grammatical errors--very disappointing considering its theme. I guess I will have to keep on referring to my old black and white photocopied maps and articles from the Brittanica which, though sometimes dated, are the best resource I have out here in rural Korea. I am very disappointed in Mister Comrie who I know is a very reputable scholar of language universals and linguistic typology.

At first sight, »The Atlas Of Languages« seems like a very interesting and highly educating book. But as soon as I started to read it, I encountered mistake after mistake. Not only are the maps inaccurate and rather badly done, there are also lots of factual errors.

In other words, this book is yet another of way too many sad examples of... compromises between layout and `popular science'.

The only reason I keep this book in my bookcase is for reference purposes. And even those, I would always have to doubt about their credibilty!

As a first attempt to collect linguistical maps of different parts of the world in one volume, this book is a must for all those interested in linguistics. The TEXT, written by a team of expert linguists, is clear, easily readable, yet scholarly and precise. More recent theories of language relations like the Austric family or the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis are included. At some points the book (like linguistics in general) tends to be a bit "indo-europocentric", e.g. by forcing the concept of "cases" to languages where this is not particularly meaningful, or by failing to discuss features like grammatical gender, which seem natural to Indo-European and Afroasian speakers only. The size and quality in which the MAPS are reproduced would have allowed a much more detailed and precise depiction of the distribution of languages. As it is, the atlas resembles elementary school history atlases where details are deliberately reduced so that kids are not confused. While the text repeatedly calls attention to the traps of defining linguistic affiliation on the basis of political considerations, in many maps the linguistic borders follow those of states with a cheerful naivity (the Balkan map on p. 35 being a most notorious example). Beside the maps showing the distribution of individual languages, in such a book one might perhaps also expect schematic maps showing the large scale distribution of individual linguistic features (e.g. SVO word order, ergativity, genders, agglutination etc.)over the world. This could have been done easily at the cost of the nice but irrelevant pictures of people in folk costumes. A reader wishing to see polynesian vahines in full dance gear should probably subscribe to National Geographic instead of buying a book called Atlas of Languages. (In fact, the supplements of that magazine often also offer linguistic maps of much higher quality than those in this book.) The last chapter of the book about writing systems is an extra bonus, well written and illustrated. All in all, a good first try -can we expect some improvements in the graphics for the second edition?

This is a "coffee-table" book, not a scholarly treatise, and it should be reviewed in that context. It does not include a tremendous amount of information about any one language or group of languages, but it does have entertaining snippets and sidebars that may whet the reader's appetite and encourage further reading of more advanced material. I agree that most of the illustrations are of little value, but the outline maps could be useful to readers who know little about the topic. Those who are looking for well-referenced, detailed accounts of the comparative features of many important languages should consult "The World's Chief Languages", edited by one of the authors of this book (Comrie). On the other hand, if you want to impress someone by using the word "ergative" in a sentence, this book will help you understand what that means, but you will need to look elsewhere to get more details. I understand that a revised edition is due out in April 2003, and hopefully some improvements have been made.

The book would please everyone interested in language genealogy and geography. It presents surveys of language families of approximately equal size giving no preference to any taxonomy branch. Thus one interested particularly in indo-european or nostratic might be disappointed a bit. I am no linguist and I cannot point any semantic errors, but being native Russian speaker I found that even modern cyrillic is not presented correctly (e.g. "e rotated" shouldn't be written like "3" as book suggests). So, I cannot believe the book's presentation of all other alphabets. Moreover, there is NO FULL LANGUAGE GENEALOGY TREE in the book, and it is hard to reconstruct the tree from the text, because authors do not put strict boundaries between geographical and genealogical aspects of language classification. Book is full of nice examples, but it fails to bring order into the described diversity.

amazing amount of silly mistakes: improper translations of simple and unambigous words, sakhalin is called a peninsula just a few pages after a map which clearly shows that it is an island, etc.
frustrating

For anyone interested in language and languages, this is a feast of information. Comprehensively conceived and beautifully presented, the work encompasses prehistorical and historical origins, geographical distributions, differences and similarities of vocabulary and grammar, writing systems, and more, in their historical, political, and social context.

Particular attention is given to the issues of languages as "fragile ecology", with the over 6,000 spoken today expected to diminish by 90% over the next century.

Generously illustrated, with numerous photos, drawings, maps, charts, tables, and informative sidebars, plus the excellent glossary, bibliography, and index. Highly recommended for the reference shelf of the general reader, and especially for those interested in the future of language and languages.

The book was on the right track as far as the operator drove it to the extent that"Japanese and Korean are remarkably similar in structure: they are both agglutinating languages with SOV word order, the verb being placed strictly at the end of sentence. There are also complex honorific forms which indicate respect to those spoken or referred to."

However, a terrible disaster happened when the Editors dared to add on to it "Although these similarities are striking, they owe much to shared cultural developments, and IT IS NOT CLEAR THAT THE TWO LANGUAGES ARE GENETICALLY RELATED."

The derailment was caused by a little negligence on the part of the editors who have overlooked the indispensable procedure to check relevant dictionaries before they moved on.

As the book rightfully pointed out, "the evidence for a relationship between Eurasian language families begins with similarities in the pronouns, and extends to a wide range."

Let us, then, compare the pronouns of Korean and Japanese.

English 1st person [I] is [Na] in Korean, and so is in Japanese. And the 2nd person [You] is [Neo] in Korean, and [Na] in Japanese, exactly the same as the 1st person. Japanese is the only language in the world, in which the 1st and the 2nd person are identical with each other. Such unbelievable phenomena were caused by the absence of <eo> character in Japanese version of alphabet. The 3rd person in Korean are [Ka] and [Keu], whereas Japanese has only [Ka] because they do not have <eu> character.

As anybody can unmistakably notice from the comparison, the only difference between the two languages is closely related to the lack of <eo> and <eu> vowels in Japanese.

Hereupon, we ought to be reminded of the fact that, as all of Japanese scholars agree, they lost three vowels from their words, probably during Aska era(toward the beginning of the 8th century AD). The three lost vowels are believed to be <ai>, <eo> and <eu>. The loss of such vowels inevitably brought upon Japanese languages a rapid and tremendous phonetic change in a short period of time. That is the reason why today's sounds of Japanese language are quite different from Korean. Nevertheless, despite of more than 1300 years elapsed since the loss of the vowels, most of Japanese words still sustain their original stems, thus attesting the genesis.

On top of the language relationship of both countries, if you read <KOZIKI> and <NIHON-SHOKI>, the oldest history books of Japan, I can assure you that you will be doubtlessly convinced of that Japanese are descendant of Korean ancestor, and that Japanese language is none other than one of Korean dialects.

Had the editors taken several minutes to look at Korean and Japanese dictionaries, they could not have missed the vital pronouns, and could save the splendor of the work.