Customer Reviews

The Languages of the World

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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.

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.

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.

I own both the second and third editions of this book, and I can attest that the improvements in the third edition make this volume far more valuable than before. Katzner now provides far more general information about language families that should satisfy the curiosity of someone not in this field. Also, the individual language entries were updated. I especially value the language map.

My two main gripes with the book are: 1) there isn't enough information about individual languages, especially those with non-Roman character sets; and 2) there are some errors that need to be corrected. One of the most glaring errors that I noticed within 3 minutes of opening the new edition is Katzner's remark that the ß (eszet) character was totally eliminated from the German language in the 1998 spelling reform. This is undeniably false.

Despite its claim and the claims of previous amazon.com reviewers, Katzner's book offers only the tiniest of insights into the vast store of languages covered. Almost no entry goes beyond simply phonetics, and there is little or no hint of grammer -- sorely missing. Many entries even fail to indicate whether or not a particular language has a written and writing history. Yet the book is a lot of fun, thanks to its topic, and offers a nice perspective. Linguists, however, looking for solid information on languages should look elsewhere.

This book is almost useless unless you like looking at foreign alphabets without understanding the smallest thing about the languages that use them. Katzner gives you a sample passage of a language in its native script with an English translation, but does nothing to impart a sense of what the language actually means or how it sounds. So, unless you can actually read the Cyrillic, Arabic or Hanggul scripts , or know the witings used to represent Buginese, Burmese, Tamil, Sanskrit or dozens of others, you know next to nothing about the language itself. There are no grammatical data given, nor any sense of how each language expresses itself. One mistake he makes over and over is confusing letters and sounds - the two are not the same, but Katzner doesn't seem to realize it.

So if you want to look at Tibetan and say to yourself, "Gee, that's a nice looking bit of writing", this is a good book for you. If you have any linguistic training, this will be a nice curiousity on your shelf. If you want to know more about Tibetan (or any of the other languages included), it will be a disappointment.

This is one of the books that started up my love for languages when I was younger.

The sections are categorized by geographic area. In each section a language is given its native script(s) then a translation in English. Following the two is a brief history and/or description of the language with information on how many people speak it and where.

I only have a couple minor complaints. One is that some scripts don't reflect the way they're used now or not written as they should be, such as Greek (they eliminated many diacritics) and Hawaiian (missing macrons). The other is the chart of language families. Some headings are incorrect, like refering to the languages of the Philippines as part of the Indonesian branch!

Despite those errors, I think this a good reference.. Especially if you come across a script you're unfamiliar with, you can compare it with those in the book. But don't expect to learn anything about the grammar or how to write the script.

The book is in 3 main parts.
Part 1 consists of a 32 page review of the Language Families of the world and packs quite a lot into this space.
Part III is again a c30 page review of the languages in use in "all" the countries of the world with indications of numbers of speakers and geographical location - again it is quite a good summary.
Part II on the other hand is the heart of the book and reviews around 200 languages giving each 1 or 2 pages (occasionally up to 4 eg for English and Chinese) - around 300 of the c 380 pages. Each language is represented by a passage of literature printed in the alphabet currently used for the language followed by an English translation. This is then followed by a review of the language setting out, inter alia,
a. Where spoken/numbers of people
b. Development history
c. Peculiarities of the alphabet, grammar and pronunciation
d. Comparisons with "near neighbours"
e. Words taken into English
f. Great writers and literature in the language

My main gripes concern
a. the balance of space given to the literature and that given to the review
b. The usefulness of the literature sample especially where it is written in an alphabet unintelligable to "western" readers
c. the comprehensiveness and consistency of the reviews themselves.

My conclusions are that far too much space is given to the literature sample and that the review is often incredibly thin with no consistency regarding coverage of aspects a-f. Also since the book makes no attmept to explore and explain alphabets all the examples of different alphabets are little better than useless!

Thus Afrikaans is given 1.3 pages of which 1 consists of a 4 stanza poem and its translation. This leaves just 13 lines for the language review, most of which is taken up with the "where spoken" information - which is largely a repeat of what is under S Africa and Namibia in section III together with a 4 line "history" and a mention of 1 "divergence" from Dutch. Two thirds of the page is left empty! This is just not good enough even for a non specialist book as this is. What are we supposed to gain from the poem and its translation? I can draw little from the translation other than some idea that a few words bear some similarity to English. Whether Afrikaans is a good means of expressing poetic ideas is not indicated and may or may not be derived from the translation. Nothing is said of "loan words" in English, nothing about the process of Afrikaans becoming a separate language or the nature of the divergence of grammar, pronunciation or vocabulary from Dutch (apart from 1 word).

A look at the "Bushman" language has half a page taken up with a story about a leopard. It utilises an "alphabet" with number of strange "characters" whose function is not clear and it gives no indication of the capabilities of the language. Whilst only 5 lines are given to a review of the language itself, again much of which repeats section III. The conventions/alphabet used are not described at all, there is no assessment of grammar, word order, cases, tenses, size of vocabulary etc etc

And so it goes on - 1 whole page of Kashmiri script, half a page of translation (much of which consists of proper nouns -Gods etc!) and 10 lines again mainly on who/where spoken. Of the language itself one learns little or nothing

So much more could have been done even within the size of the book as printed

As a person who has long been fascinated by languages and the way they work, I ask myself why I waited so long to buy this book. (Maybe because it's fairly costly for the page count?)

It's a very fun (if you like that sort of thing) summary of around 200 langauges from around the world, ranging from the well known [French, English, Spanish] to the obscure [Avar, Faroese]. I will admit that until I picked this up, I had NO idea how many languages were spoken in the former Soviet Union.

While the book is generally VERY well done, I would have liked to see a few things handled differently.
1. Actual translations (rather than adapted translations) of the poetry, to give the reader a better sense of the structure and flow of the language and the sorts of words used.
2. Transliterations of non-Roman alphabet languages -- again, to give the reader a better sense of how the language actually sounds.
3. (Especially for the more obscure languages ...) some discussion of printing and publishing in these languages. How many books/newspapers are published each year in, say, Maltese or Nenets, as compared to English or French.

Despite these minor flaws, highly recommended.

This is a great book for becoming aware of the languages spoken on our planet. You can look up a given language & see a text taken from the traditions of that language followed by a translation before reading the article about that language. It also has a section on language families, and a country-by-country survey of languages. Very interesting reading and useful for gaining an overview of the world's languages.