Product Description

An essential guide to the languages of the world; includes information on over 600 languages.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #318829 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'All will delight in the extensive linguistic buffet presented in The Languages of the World.' - Times Literary Supplement

From the Back Cover
This Third Edition of Kenneth Katzner's best-selling guide to languages is essential reading for language enthusiasts everywhere. Written with the non-specialist in mind, its user-friendly style and layout, delightful original passages and exotic scripts, will continue to fascinate reader. This new edition has been thoroughly revised to include more languages, more countries and up-to-date data on populations.
Features include:
*information on nearly 600 languages
*individual descriptions of 200 languages, with sample passages and English translations
*concise notes on where each language is spoken, its history, alphabet and pronunciation
*coverage of every country in the world, its main language and speaker numbers
*English borrowings from other languages
*an introduction to language families

About the Author
Prior to his recent retirement, Kenneth Katzner worked for the US government and also served as an editor on a number of international encyclopedias and English dictionaries. He is also author of a large English-Russian/Russian-English Dictionary.

Customer Reviews

good, but a bit superficial
This is a good book, not a great book. It gives a lot of general information about a lot of languages, which is really nice. A table at the beginning provides a good, quick reference to the world's languages' "family tree". Following this, the first part of the book discusses the various language families, with more detail about languages in the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic branches. The second part, covering about 200 individual languages, is really what the book is all about. This section is organized by place rather than language family, so the first section is "Languages of Europe" and the other sections are for the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, the Western Hemisphere, and Africa. There is also one more thrown in for good measure: "An artificial language", which discusses Esperanto. This organization is perhaps a bit odd from a linguist's perspective, but it does work very well for browsing (which is really what this book is geared towards). Fortunately, if you are looking for information on a specific language, there is an index of all the languages mentioned in the book. For each language there is a sample of the its script and a short description, usually identifying where it is spoken, how many speakers, relations to other languages and so on. The length and quality of these descriptions vary. Finally, the third part of the book is a country-by-country survey, arranged in alphabetical order. This gives each country's total population, languages spoken, and the number of speakers of those languages.

Now, although this all sounds really good (and it is), there are major weaknesses in the book. This comes primarily from the fact that the author has obviously got his information from countless different sources, as no one person can be an expert in all languages. However, it makes the book hard to trust. For instance, because I know a bit about Celtic languages, I looked them up here. The author refers to Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic simply as "Gaelic", implying that they are the same language but simply called different things in Scotland and Ireland. This is simply not the case. Furthermore, he states that there 100,000 speakers of Irish in Northern Ireland. Again, I know that this is at best a misleading figure. Irish is dead in Northern Ireland as native language, and there are not even that many speakers in the Republic of Ireland. Presumably this number comes from figures relating to the number of people who have done Irish at school, or who otherwise "have a little Irish". All of this makes me question everything else I read in the book.

In short, this book is nice for getting an overview of many languages. I don't regret buying it, but I was disappointed. If you want a quick reference to the world's many languages, this is it. But only use it for browsing, not as a reference, and realize that it only mentions 600 languages--about 1/10th of the world's languages.

Extremely superficial guide to some writing systems
This book ought to have a different name, as it doesn't actually tell you much about the languages, but rather about which letters do and do not exist in each language, which is rather irrelevant information. For a linguist, the text is nearly completely useless. The one good thing to say about this work is that it supplies examples from a lot of languages, something which is otherwise hard to find in one or few books. It would be extremely more useful for me as a linguist if there was a translitteration and if possible a quasi-translation under each line of the texts, as a text written in an asian script you have never heard of gives you nothing more than a superficial impression of how it looks - it certainly has nothing to do with the language that it is used to write.

A fun, diverse little introduction
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.