The Languages of the World | Kenneth Katzner | Fun book, but not the "last word" on world languages

The Languages of the World | Kenneth Katzner | Very good for basic knowledge despite a few errors.

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The Languages of t...

	The Languages of the World Kenneth Katzner Routledge, 2002 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Written with the non-specialist in mind, this third edition of Kenneth Katzner's best-selling guide's attractive style and layout, delightful original passages and exotic scripts will continue to fascinate all language scholars and linguists. This new edition has been thoroughly revised to include more languages, more countries and current data on populations. This indispensable resource contains information on nearly 600 languages-individual descriptions of 200 languages with sample passages and English translations; concise notes on where each language is spoken and its history, alphabet and pronunciation; coverage of every country in the world and its main language and speaker numbers; English borrowings from other languages; an introduction to language families. This will be your passport to the speech of the world.

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Fun book, but not the "last word" on world languages

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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Very good for basic knowledge despite a few errors.

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.

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Great Summary for the Non-Specialist

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.

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The most enchanting book around for young people interested in languages, though professionals may grumble

Discovering some older edition of THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD in high school was a life-changing experience. This work Kenneth Katzner is, as far as I know, the only book for the average man that showcases the immense diversity of human tongues. It's certainly not a serious work of reference (for which I prefer Routledge's "Language Family Surveys" series, e.g. The Slavonic Languages), but will delight anyone with a passing interest in language.

The book is divided into three parts. The first describes the major language families of the world. Katzner presents the concept of a language family by showing how the Indo-European languages can be grouped together by such common words as "month", "mother", "new", "night", "nose", and "three", while e.g. Basque, Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish plainly aren't related. Katzner admirably denies a link between those families some crackpots have connected, explaining that what matters is common vocabulary, and as long as that's missing vague similarities could be mere coincidence. The third part of the book is a listing of countries with information on the major languages spoken in each.

The meat of the book, however, is the middle part. Here Katzner gives sample texts and translations for nearly 200 languages, along with remarks on where they are spoken, how many speakers they have, and what scripts they are written from. The sample texts are usually from the cream of literature in the language described--I was so wowed by the passage from Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country in the description of Japanese that I immediately sought out that novel, and the inclusion of Sergei Chavain's ELNET in the description of Mari hopefully brings this pearl of literature to better attention in the West.

Much criticism has been brought upon THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD for the meagre amount of information given about each language. Katzner rarely discusses the grammar or lexicon of a language, but rather is very much concerned with the script it's written in. However, I think this is an appropriate strategy for the book's target audience, for often among young people especially interest in alphabets ("How do I write my name in Arabic/Chinese/Russian?") comes before interest in conjugation or syntax. At least the book doesn't abound in factual errors, common in popular books on language, and the only truly objectionable matter I find is the inclusion of Esperanto, as if it were a real language.

If you have an acquaintance, especially a young person, interested in languages, Katzner's THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD makes a great gift

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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