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55 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
killer handbook, December 2, 2001
This is a well-written handbook to find out what language is spoken where and the history of its speakers. There are snippets of approximately 200 carefully chosen passages of representative literature shown both in their native alphabets and in English translation. A fun read, great reference, and very relevant to current events. The book is divided into three parts: an introduction to language families of the world, a listing of the individual languages themselves grouped in geographic order, and an alphabetically-arranged country-by-country survey of the languages spoken in each country. The section on language families describes relationships among language groups, a bit on the history of the people who speak them, and the geographical distribution of each family. The bulk of the book is in the second section on the individual languages. Each language is (usually) given a two-page description consisting of passages in their native script, along with an English translation, followed by a brief history of the language, its speakers, and the regions where the language is spoken. Examples of words that have found their way into English usage are also provided. The country survey consists of paragraph-long descriptions of the languages spoken in each country along with the number of speakers for each language. Katzner's book is geared for the general reader who may be more interested on how languages relate to the countries where they are spoken rather than the morphology and syntax of a particular language. Those who prefer a more linguistic-oriented approach should try Concise Compendium of the Worlds Languages by George L. Campbell. It is as well written as Katzner's book but contains more detail on phonology and grammar. Both have excellent depictions of native alphabets with Katzner using examples from classic literature (e.g. Flaubert in French, Iqbal in Urdu, and Tagore in Bengali) whereas Campbell uses a passage from the Gospel of St John to illustrate the written form of the language. If your interest includes knowing what consonants are affricates, fricatives, or semi-vowels then look into Campbell's book. But if you want to know a little something about who speaks Pashto or about what are the dominant languages in India or other similar sorts of information then Katzner's book is for you.
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fun book, but not the "last word" on world languages, August 8, 2004
This review is from: The Languages of the World (Paperback)
Kenneth Katzner has set himself a difficult task--review the languages of the world in a reasonably-sized volume. This means that, inevitably, a lot of important detail is going to be left out. Most, but not all, nations have their national languages recognized here. Some smaller languages are included both for completeness and for examples of interesting linguistic variations. One, Naxi, spoken in Yunnan, China, is still written with little pictures; a stick figure jumping represents dancing, for instance. Some other reviewers have complained that there is a lack of detail about the writing systems, so that seeing the original language and its translation is not that helpful. This does not account for the complexity of some of these alphabets, like Burmese or Thai or Devenagari (Hindi and some other Indian languages); which have a LOT of letters and modifications of letters. Once you start down that road, the book could easily double in size! However, he does explain a little about how some alphabets work, like how Korean (Hangul alphabet) has its letters grouped into little three-letter clusters, not written in a straight line. One major improvement that would help a future edition of the book: Typeset the foreign languages! Clearly, some samples are photoreproduced from old sources, and the letters are unclear and hard to see and/or of poor overall quality (and vary in size from language to language, even languages using the same alphabet). This is particularly noticeable with some of the odder Asian scripts. The Unicode project is trying to allow computers to recognize nearly any script (even obscure ones); the next edition of this book should take advantage of such advances and typeset those languages that are not in this edition. Another useful item, but harder to implement, would be detailed transliterations of each foreign language passage (at least those in non-Roman scripts). Then the reader could see (at least approximately) how various words and letters are written and spoken in the language in question. This opens up a whole new set of problems, of course; Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese are the same in writing but vastly different in speech, so would they both have to be represented? That dialect question would crop up a lot. Some languages are written in more than one script, too, or have transitioned from one to another recently. Showing such languages in both scripts is fun, but rarely done in this book, even when the book mentions that the language has multiple scripts. But overall, the book is a fun introduction to many languages and will familiarize the reader with the "look" of many of them.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Can Tell You A Lot About Languages--And The World, March 15, 2003
This review is from: The Languages of the World (Paperback)
Kenneth Katzner provides a well written and concisely presented book for those interested in the world's languages, their origins, growth and transformations, and linguistic relatives. The languages are listed by familial grouping, then individual languages, and then nation by nation. Easy-to-read charts elucidating families, sub-groups, branches, and major and minor languages are listed in the front of the book. Individually, the languages are listed in the index in the back of the book in alphabetical order making them easy to find and cross-reference. One can quickly find which languages are related via sub-families. You can bounce around from page to page with this. Each language listed is presented with a sample such as a poem or proverb followed by an English transliteration. Also included is the number of people who speak it, and in what different parts of the world. The languages' family, idiocyncracies, major grammar points, alphabet, and stresses are noted. As an example, here's a paraphrase of the Finnish language presented in the book: Spoken by 5 million speakers in Finland, 70,000 in the U.S., 200,000 in Sweden and 50,000 in Russia. Finnish is one of the few languages in Europe that is not of the Indo-European languages family. Like Estonian, it belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages which are a branch derived from the Uralic family. Finnish is difficult language to learn for Western native speakers because of it's non Indo-European origins and the the fact that it has 15 noun cases. Also in the beginning is a biography of the families of languages and explanations of the migrations of people, many thousands of years ago, that has created the current multi-varied linguistic make up of our world today.
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