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One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost | 
 enlarge | Creator: Peter K. Austin
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 79023
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 10.5 x 8.7 x 1
ISBN: 0520255607
Dewey Decimal Number: 417.7
EAN: 9780520255609
ASIN: 0520255607
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
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Product Description
There are more than six thousand languages used around the world today, although linguists now estimate that by the year 2050 as many as half of those will be extinct. This beautifully designed, engagingly written reference takes us on a panoramic tour of the globe to explore this unique and endangered human gift. Generously illustrated throughout with color photographs, informative sidebars, and clear maps and graphics, One Thousand Languages illuminates the sources, characteristics, and interrelationships of the world's spoken tongues. It looks in detail at the eleven global languages, then delves into the major languages of each world region in turn. Each entry gives a history of the growth and development of the language, details the number of speakers, and traces its geographical spread. The volume also provides information on many extinct languages. A detailed map section tracks the migrations of the major languages, and the book also tells how to count to ten in more than 250 ways.
Copub: Ivy Press Limited
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| Customer Reviews:
Good idea, poorly executed. September 12, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I enjoy languages and browsing, and was excited to get a copy of the book. The book is well set out, with some colourful (but not very large) pictures to browse through. The sweep of languages is impressive, although space considerations mean that many of them are only given a paragraph or so, unfortunately.
The real problem I have with the book, though, comes down to accuracy and editing. I don't know to what extent Prof. Austin supervised the entirety of the book, but I was very disappointed with lack of fact-checking and some egregious omissions. For example, some (but sadly, not all) of the languages include a small inset with the numbers from one to ten in that language. For the section on Arabic, one of the eleven "world languages" given their own section, the Arabic script is not only backwards (read from left to right) but each letter is left unconnected to others in the word. Arabic is NEVER written this way, and there are 200+ million people in the world who could have corrected this. Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, has 20 million speakers, not 10 million (as the book claims). The Russian word for "one" (in counting) is raz, not odin (in Cyrillic, of course). Et cetera.
In addition, most of the later languages in the book (ie, the non-"world" languages) get short shrift. Languages are presented individually as rather random collections of facts, with no real consistency in how each language is described (eg, sample words/phrases, grammar, geographical spread, linguistic history) - it's a crapshoot for any given language. Some of this is probably due to lack of knowledge, but it would have been nice, for example, to have the numbers from 1-10 for each language, just to get a feel for it.
It's glossy and pretty and is an OK coffee table book, but shows its lack of depth after more than five minutes of reading. I think if 1,000 languages had been pared to a few hundred, with more pictures, examples, and better attention paid to each, it would have been a far better result. I was disappointed - I'd been hoping for more.
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