 "A Labor of Love That Needs Editing" | 2009-11-03 |
| - Reviewed By An Amazon User |
| "The Languages of the World" was obviously a labor of love on the part of its author, the late Kenneth Katzner. I first bought the Second Edition several years ago, and was fascinated by the tidbits of information that it offered up. However, the Third Edition (published just a year before Katzner's death) has some shortcomings and outright mistakes in it that I hope some future editor of a Fourth Edition might address. One example of a shorcoming is that Katzner often leaves plenty of blank space after many of his entries--space that could well be used to give a more detailed description of the language in question, such as grammatical structure. And one example of an outright mistake that I caught was that the author writes that the "double-s" (ß) in German was abolished in a spelling reform of the year 1998. In fact, this particular letter is still used, but the spelling reform has decreed that it should only be used when the preceding vowel is long. Therefore, it is no longer used in the word "dass" ("that," in the sense of "He said that..."), but it is still used in words like Straße (street) and "Außerdem" ("Besides that,..."). That said, if a future editor does put out a Fourth Edition, he/she could correct some of Katzner's errors and add more detailed information in the individual entries. All in all though, "The Languages of the World" is a wonderful introduction to its eponymous subject for the lay reader; and my biggest regret is that Kenneth Katzner is no longer with us. |
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 "Lay linguistics" | 2008-10-29 |
| - Reviewed By An Amazon User |
| This book is interesting to the language hobbyist. It has samples of many languages and the corresponding translations, plus a description of the place of the language in the area where it is spoken. A very enjoyable reference book to peak into from time to time. |
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| "Great Summary for the Non-Specialist" | 2008-07-28 |
| - Reviewed By Readz Alot from USA |
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" | 2007-06-26 |
| - Reviewed By Christopher Culver |
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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| "Very good for basic knowledge despite a few errors." | 2005-03-25 |
| - Reviewed By enutt |
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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 "Could have been so much better" | 2005-01-01 |
| - Reviewed By Solivagant from UK Middlesbrough |
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 whose "alphabet" utilises a number of strange "characters" whose function is not clear and which 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 |
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