Customer Reviews

The World's Major Languages

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a wonderfully thick, dense, wide-ranging piece of work. If you love delving into the complexities and peculiarities of individual languages, you could get lost in this book for hours on end. I checked out every section on a language &/or family that I'm well informed about, and found the info solid and trustworthy throughout.

The contributors are mostly British and American academic linguists, each of whom wrote a section. While there are differences in style--some iron-gray academic, some a bit more lively and colloquial--each author makes sure that each language receives coverage on all its levels. An abundance of examples and explanations ensures that the descriptions, though highly technical and dense, do not lapse into obscurity. This is probably the best 1-volume work of its kind that I have seen. Its only drawback is that some of the world's most interesting languages (such as Basque and other isolates; pidgins & creoles; and some Native American and Australian languages) receive little space due to the avowed focus on languages with large numbers of speakers. A volume which included sections on minor languages / families would more accurately represent the great variety that exists in languages throughout the world.

Ever wondered how a particular language functions? Well, this book is the one to use! It includes grammatical sketches of languages with sizeable amounts of native speakers. Each section generally contains the some of the following about a language: brief historical background, phonology, morphology, syntax, and if it's not written in Roman letters, a chart for that particular alphabet/syllabary. One of the things I particular liked was giving word-for-word translations then giving a free one. This gives me an idea on how languages like German, Japanese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, etc. form their sentences (like SVO, VSO, SOV). And also for some languages, like Polish and Spanish, it lists the allophones for a phoneme. A word of advice, I highly recommend having at least some knowledge in linguistic terminology and in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), since this book uses them extensively. This is one reference work that you should definitely have.

One of the best books on languages, "The World's Major Languages," is a must have for all those who want to undertand the complexity and origins of many of the world's major languages. As the title reads, the book discusses the world's major languages in order by their origin groups (e.g. Teutonic/Germanic, Romance, Slavic, etc...) and Comrie in my opinion is the best author when it comes to distinguishing languages.

At 1,025 pages, this book gives an extensive history and study of most of the major languages. While one reviewer on this forum was upset that Native American languages weren't cover, I feel that Mr. Comrie did his best in discussing only those languages with over 10 million present-day speakers.

I feel it would be important for many interested in cultural politics where language places a major role in dividing a nation or region (e.g. Canada/Quebec, Flemish & Walloons in Belgium, Puerto Rico & U.S., Spain's central government and Catalans and Basques) to read this book. I feel that the only lanaguage that wasn;t covered but should have been was Catalan, seeing that over 13 million people speak it and it is the 7th most spoken in the European Union (although it is not officially recognized by the organization). Besides this omission, this is one of the nest books I have read in years! A must-read for anyone interested in languages and culture.

The only thing I can say negative about this book is that it came out in hardcover first, for nearly $100, and after I bought that, the paperback came out at a third of the price. It is one of only a couple of books for which I was ever willing to pay that much money, and that alone should be a clue as to how much I liked it.

There are chapters on most of the important languages of the world, as well as some of the language families that include these languages. Each chapter is by a different expert (actually, a few people wrote more than one chapter), and so there is some unevenness in the treatment. But in general, each of the single-language chapters gives a relatively detailed summary of the grammar and vocabulary of the language it covers; the language-family chapters describe the common features of languages in the family. The level of detail is not that of a textbook in the language, but rather enough to give someone like myself (interested in linguistics, but not fluent in anything but my own native English) a good feeling for how the language works.

The first book of this type that I ever saw was Mario Pei's "The World's Chief Languages." This book goes into more detail on any individual language than Pei's book did, but covers a smaller number of languages (though more varied ones). It belongs in the library of anyone who wants to know a little bit of how a lot of languages work.

This is the best survey of the world's languages that I have come across. Although it is written by scholars for scholars to read, and parts of it are quite technical, nearly all of it can easily be understood by non-specialists. Taking (at random, the place where the book fell open) the chapter on Bengali as an example, the introduction describing the historical background occupies a little more than three pages and can be read by anyone. It is followed by a few pages on the writing and sound system, illustrated with appropriate tables and no more technical than it needs to be. The longest section is on morphology, and is again quite understandable. Afterwards comes a section on syntax, followed by concluding points. Altogether the chapter occupies 24 pages and is representative of the book as a whole.

The most difficult point to decide in compiling a book of this kind is the choice of languages to include: what constitutes a "major language"? On the whole the editors have taken the view that the importance of a language is determined by the number of speakers, but they have not been entirely rigid about that: Kannada, for example, has far more speakers than Czech and Slovak together, but is not included, whereas they are. There are others, such as Quechua (already mentioned by other reviewers), and the languages of the highlands of New Guinea (the most linguistically diverse region in the world) that have an interest that goes beyond their purely numerical importance. However, the book already has more than 1000 pages, and it is much too easy to think of other languages to include, but much more difficult to think of ones to leave out.

The obvious choice (for me) would have been the chapter on Czech and Slovak -- not important enough numerically, not different enough from Russian, Polish and Serbo-Croat -- but apart from them it is very difficult to think of anything else to exclude to make room for others. Czech and Slovak (and to some degree Serbo-Croat, or Serbian and Croat as we call them today) illustrate another difficulty. The book was published in 1990, right at the end of a period in which the two languages had been moving together, and had become "on average 90 per cent mutually intelligible", but in the years since then they have been moving apart. Today's Slovaks would doubtless be happy to see their language included at all, but might be less happy to see it treated as little more than a variant version of Czech.

What of Spanish and Portuguese, both of them major languages by any standards, but, at least in written form, quite similar to one another and mutually intelligible for educated readers (again, in written form)? Rather than having two separate chapters occupying more than 40 pages, with abundant detail about their separate characteristics, but very little comparison and contrasting, it might have been more useful and interesting to deal with them together (and together with Catalan and Galician).

But these are minor quibbles. It would have been impossible to include all the languages one would like to see without going to several thousand pages, or a very different sort of book, with very little detailed information about each one. Mario Pei's various books were of this latter type, but of a far lower intellectual quality and much more superficial. As it stands Comrie's book can be thoroughly recommended, and at less than 4 cents per page (for the paperback) the price is very reasonable.

I agree with the other reviewers on the magnificence of the dead-tree first edition; no-one has yet reviewed the second edition, nor its Kindle version, so I'll focus on the Kindle second edition. The electronic editor got the first (literally, for once) thing wrong: the title. It has a hyphen rather than an apostrophe, which shows that the publisher did even less checking than usual for Kindle conversions. The carelessness isn't confined to the title, even in the free sample; Table 1.1, of basic Indo-European terms, is horribly dismembered. This may be unavoidable in some form-factors, but it could have worked on the iPad in landscape mode, if a human had bothered to check.

Some text, e.g. the accented name of one of the contributors, Dinh-Hoa Nguyen (whose accented form Amazon won't permit me to write), is rendered as graphics, not text, and can't be properly highlighted.

At the beginning of "Greek in its Geographic and Social Context" (location 24630-37) the Greek is comically mistranscribed: "KópivOos; 'Corinth', µívOn 'mint'". (In case Amazon's site filters that badly, the book's electronic editor really did transcribe theta as capital O, and eta as n.)

Professor Comrie's own chapter on Slavonic isn't safe to read either, e.g. "the shift ... to reduced vowels (jers) symbolised b, b" (17,876). This transcends mere ignorance, since Routledge's editor transcribed both jers, right next to each other, as the same character, the letter b. This of course renders much of the text unreliable and/or unreadable, e.g., "*mbxbbmb" (17,952), and a mystifying opposition between "nos" and "nos" in the next paragraph. Likewise the apparently systematic mistranscription of ' (ch) as c, e.g., 18,028 ("South Slavonic shc"), and 18,038 (amusingly: "c and c").

Some mistakes can't be excused even by ignorance and stupidity, for instance misspelling "Indo-European" (17,898), or completely omitting the word being glossed ("moka" for 'torment', earlier on the same page.)

The content in the second edition is wonderful, of course, and so far seems slightly improved from the first edition. The preface says that two languages, Javanese and Amharic, have been added. The existing chapters supposedly have all had their bibliographies updated; this is certainly true of the introduction, the only bibliography in the sample. For nineteen chapters this has been the only revision; the remaining chapters "have been revised, at times substantially." Most of the changes I've noticed have been minor but good, e.g., adding Nostratic to the discussion of macro-families in place of part of an overly-long list of possible families. A reference to Sumerian has been substituted in the brief subsection on Anatolian languages, and Carian added. The spelling of Bogazkoy has been changed, but Amazon would filter either the new or the old one, so I won't attempt to display the difference. I've noticed a few minor improvements in the chapters on Slavonic and Russian, but nothing sufficient to make up for the transcription errors.

There are some mild changes mandated by political correctness, e.g. BCE for BC, and a longer title for the section on Serbo-Croat, which also has an additional contributor. Contributor's affiliations are no longer after their names in the table of contents, but are now in a separate section. There's also an inessential substitution of Mexico for California in the first paragraph of the introduction, and slightly more apologizing in the preface for making judgements in order to live up to the book's title.

I had hoped to hold out for a proof-read iBooks edition using Unicode, but couldn't resist the temptation to have this marvelous book on my person at all times for the rest of my life. eBooks Dot Com does advertise an ePub version for the same price as the hardcover, though the sample seems to be for the PDF rather than the ePub. The Barnes and Noble Nook store lists the book as available for a price described as Free, $0.01, and NaN, but the copy I purchased only had five pages poorly scanned from the Bantu Languages section. I don't see much hope that the Kindle version's errors will be corrected, since it would require Routledge to hire someone educated, intelligent, and diligent to do the whole job over again. Merely correcting individual errata will not suffice.

The price of the Kindle edition is half that of the paperback, which doesn't even exist yet; it's a fifth the price of the hardback second edition. If you own the first edition and can't use the Kindle version, the paperback, due in February 2011, may be worth waiting for, for the bibliographies. And, of course, if don't own any edition, by all means buy one, though which to buy will depend on your budget and patience.

This book is a great, if dense, survey of the world's languages. As the title says, the book covers only "major languages" (for this reason, the Celtic languages are not included; neither are any Native American languages). The book is very thorough in its subject area (an overview, not a grammar primer). However, there are several negative points. The quality of the chapters, as noted by the two-star reviewer, does vary somewhat (although perhaps not as much as he makes it sound--no chapter is noticeably unprofessional throughout). There is also no unifying phonetic transcription. Some chapters use IPA, others a language-specific representation, and still others none at all. Finally, some chapters seem not to be very well organized (the Sanskrit chapter comes to mind--it contains far too much text and not enough charts or examples). The book also suffers from Euro-centrism, with several sections devoted to the various Indo-European language families of Europe and only one for the IE languages of India. The rest of the book does not seem as well-covered as the Indo-European language chapters.

In response to the complaint about Native American languages, I see both sides: Comrie's intent was to create a description of major languages. Whatever they may be, the Native American languages cannot really be called "major" (although Cherokee, Quechua, and perhaps Nahuatl come close). This is not to say that they do not deserve inclusion, though, so I see where the two-star reviewer was coming from. This does not, however, meant that the book is not worth purchasing--it certainly is.

The World's Major Languages is an excellent concise volume describing many languages from around the world. It is very informative. Another must have for a linguists library.

I got this book for $9.00 plus 3.99 S&H. Amazing price and amazing delivery!! Got it in less than a week!!

Altho, as the previous reviewer noted, the Americas were left out, it's otherwise very good. Most of the articles are very informative, and very interesting. Altho there is some degree of Eurocentric bias, there is a great variety of non-European and non-IE languages.