Ocean State Libraries

"A tour of the world's twenty most-spoken languages explores the history, geography, linguistics, and cultures that have been shaped by languages and their customs." -- "English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 or so billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages....

"Spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences ... [and taking] us into today's remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that...

Gardini shares his deep love for Latin and encourages us to engage with a civilization that has never ceased to exist, becuase it's here with us now, whether we know it or not. Even readers without a single lick of Latin grammar can discover how this language is still capable of restoring our sense of identity, with the power that only useless things can miraculously express. --

"Curiosidades, bulos, novedades, falsos amigos y otras cuestiones para disfrutar de la lengua española. ¿Qué palabras están transformando nuestro mundo? ¿Almóndiga y cocreta están aceptadas? ¿Cuáles son los cambios de la lengua que han resultado más polémicos? ¿Hay palabras caníbales? La lengua es el patrimonio inmaterial más grande que tienen todos los hablantes de un mismo idioma. En los 1001 asuntos que se tratan en este libro, se...