Customer Reviews

Concise Compendium of the World's Languages

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The bulk of this book is a set of 4-5 page capsule summaries of over 100 languages. It is written clearly, in language that is very accessible to the layman. Though one would not think it possible, the brief language descriptions really do capture many important aspects of the languages.

A must-read for those who want to know how many different ways there are for humans to arrange their thoughts. Yet there are some problems.

This book is a digest of a much larger (and frightfully expensive) hardcover original. Unfortunately, several of this book's internal references are to languages or topics that appear only in the larger original.

Phonology is discussed in a variant of IPA that is nowhere described. Languages written in non-Latin alphabets are transliterated according to inconsistent and unexplained methods. In some cases, the connection between a language's phonology and its orthography is poorly documented.

Since few of the reading audience are familiar with many of the languages discussed, it behooves the editor to be quite careful about errors. Unfortunately, a few minor errors have crept in -- just enough to be annoying.

For instance: in the essay on Semitic languages, Arabic is erroneously classified as South Semitic; in the essay on Japanese, words are transliterated using two incompatible methods, seemingly at random; Zulu numerals greater than 5 are given in an antique form that is no longer in use.

In spite of its minor problems, I recommend this book highly.

This book is a great book when it's successful. Its short (5-page, typical) descriptions of languages pack a lot of punch. This book is wonderful in that is gives introductions for so many languages that you may have vaguely heard of but don't know anything about [if only there were a series of books covering the same languages but with the depth and accuracy of Comrie's "The World's Major Languages"!].

It also has a major omission: it often leaves out sufficient description of how the script [when Roman] or transcription [in other cases] relates to the sounds, so in many cases you have little idea how to actually pronounce the words being shown. [This points out a general problem, the quality of the editing varies greatly.]

HOWEVER -- the biggest problem is that this book has more errors than you can shake a stick at, esp. in phonology. I looked up the 8 or 10 languages I know well enough to be confident in my knowledge of their phonemes, and nearly every one is wrong, sometimes shockingly so.

e.g.:

- w, y are left out of proto-semitic. not so bad, but:
- the hebrew phonology includes the six spirant allophones in its list of phonemes, and one "outer-space" phoneme, "ts", which completely doesn't belong. [a contamination from proto-semitic or modern hebrew?]
- the german phonology incorrectly lists two r phonemes [perhaps a confused way of noting that different dialects pronounce the phoneme differently?], and an extra non-existent short closed e.
- the old english phonology is totally garbled. various allophones of all sorts are randomly mixed into the list, with no description of what's a phoneme and what's not, and some sounds are even thrown in that were neither phonemes nor allophones [long and short oe].
- even the modern english phonology has an error! this of all things you'd expect them to get correct, but they randomly threw in a palatal n in the phonology.
- the european portuguese phonology throws in a couple of allophones in their phoneme list [without, of course, noting that they're just allophones], but some other allophones are not in the list; rather, they're described below.
- the spanish section lists the allophones of /d/, but inexplicably leaves out the parallel /b/ and /g/ (and /b/ is the _most_ important to note because of the spelling implications!).

this is just checking what i know. with errors everywhere i look, i can only assume similar errors everywhere else, which really destroys what would otherwise be a great work.

ben

This overview is an abbreviated version of the two-volume Compendium of the Worlds Languages by the same author containing about one hundred of the latter's three hundred language entries. For this volume some of the entries have been expanded and amplified. Languages having a written tradition are accompanied by verses 1 - 8 of the Gospel of John in their native orthography.

After an introductory sketch and script description, each language entry contains a brief section on phonology followed by a section morphology and syntax. The phonology section discusses palatalization, stops, aspirates, and fricatives, short and long vowels, diphthongs, stress, and the use of tones. The morphology and syntax section covers noun usage (case, gender, etc), verb forms (e.g. tenses, voices, moods), adjectives, pronouns (their forms, declensions, etc), numerals, and word order. An appendix of scripts and a bibliography complete the book.

This is an accessible work in comparative languages although some basic familiarity with grammatical terminology is assumed on the part of the reader. Some of the phonological errors in the first volume have been dealt with but many others remain. Most of the widely spoken and contemporarily relevant tongues are covered and most language families are represented by at least one entry. A similar volume by Kenneth Katzner ("Languages of the World") covers more languages but not in the linguistic context that Campbell follows. Purchase Campbell's volume if you are interested in brief phonological and morphological snapshots of a language; purchase Katzner's volume if linguistic aspects do not appeal you as much as the distribution and historical development of its speakers. Given the errors, however, do not use this volume as an authoritative reference.

As a lifelong polyglot, I enjoy flipping through this book, memorizing grammar notes and other linguistic tidbits. Unfortunately, there are mistakes and omissions that are incomprehensible. Mr. Campbell seems to have conveniently forgotten that Hebrew is a modern, living language. His bibliography shows about four books on Hebrew, all Biblical. The section on Arabic is more representative of that living language. His text examples, when in non-Latin scripts, are useless unless one decides to memorize the scripts chapters in the back. He should have included IPA transcriptions side by side. His introduction claims that the book was meant for the lay person without the use of highly technical terms, but he rarely explains terms when he uses them. For instance, there are no definitions of the 15 Finnish cases. A glossary would be a handy addition to a new edition.
Buy this book for the fact that anything like it does not exist elsewhere, but I would recommend individual books on the individual language groups that interest you.

This book makes for interesting browsing material. It has descriptions of plenty of languages--short, but long enough to have some interesting information in them. Unfortunately, it is not very accurate. Other reviewers have noted mistakes; I have found a few others, but none are occuring to me at the moment. The information is cobbled together from a wide variety of sources, which means that the phonetic transcription is inconsistent and some of the information is contradictory. The editor obviously did not know all of the languages in the book, which is to be expected, but it allowed plenty of clumsy errors to creep in. Some important information is also missing, especially where orthography is concerned. Instead of this book I would recommend Bernard Comrie's "The World's Major Languages," which covers many fewer languages but with greater depth and accuracy.

It's OK, I suppose.
The language background, grammar and script (where applicable), despite the necessary brevity are well presented and provide the reader enough interest to stimulate further study or pursuit.
The choice of the passage shown in the various spellings and scripts is much less fortunate: the quote from the New Testament is quite quaint, and the reproduction of the scripts, in the vast majority of cases, is uneven and of very poor quality for the current technology.
The opening sentence from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, would have been a more politically correct choice, and the use of "live" fonts rather than scanned images would have made this Compendium much closer to otherwise unattainable perfection.
PS. Was the omission of the Yiddish passage intentional?