The World's Major Languages

I got this book for $9.00 plus 3.99 S&H. Amazing price and amazing delivery!! Got it in less than a week!!

This is the best survey of the world's languages that I have come across. Although it is written by scholars for scholars to read, and parts of it are quite technical, nearly all of it can easily be understood by non-specialists. Taking (at random, the place where the book fell open) the chapter on Bengali as an example, the introduction describing the historical background occupies a little more than three pages and can be read by anyone. It is followed by a few pages on the writing and sound system, illustrated with appropriate tables and no more technical than it needs to be. The longest section is on morphology, and is again quite understandable. Afterwards comes a section on syntax, followed by concluding points. Altogether the chapter occupies 24 pages and is representative of the book as a whole.

The most difficult point to decide in compiling a book of this kind is the choice of languages to include: what constitutes a "major language"? On the whole the editors have taken the view that the importance of a language is determined by the number of speakers, but they have not been entirely rigid about that: Kannada, for example, has far more speakers than Czech and Slovak together, but is not included, whereas they are. There are others, such as Quechua (already mentioned by other reviewers), and the languages of the highlands of New Guinea (the most linguistically diverse region in the world) that have an interest that goes beyond their purely numerical importance. However, the book already has more than 1000 pages, and it is much too easy to think of other languages to include, but much more different to think of ones to leave out.

The obvious choice (for me) would have been the chapter on Czech and Slovak -- not important enough numerically, not different enough from Russian, Polish and Serbo-Croat -- but apart from them it is very difficult to think of anything else to exclude to make room for others. Czech and Slovak (and to some degree Serbo-Croat, or Serbian and Croat as we call them today) illustrate another difficulty. The book was published in 1990, right at the end of a period in which the two languages had been moving together, and had become "on average 90 per cent mutually intelligible", but in the years since then they have been moving apart. Today's Slovaks would doubtless be happy to see their language included at all, but might be less happy to see it treated as little more than a variant version of Czech.

What of Spanish and Portuguese, both of them major languages by any standards, but, at least in written form, quite similar to one another and mutually intelligible for educated readers (again, in written form)? Rather than having two separate chapters occupying more than 40 pages, with abundant detail about their separate characteristics, but very little comparison and contrasting, it might have been more useful and interesting to deal with them (together with Catalan and Galician).

But these are minor quibbles. It would have been impossible to include all the languages one would like to see without going to several thousand pages, or a very different sort of book, with very little detailed information about each one. Mario Pei's various books were of this latter type, but of a far lower intellectual quality and much more superficial. As it stands Comrie's book can be thoroughly recommended, and at less than 4 cents per page (for the paperback) the price is very reasonable.

This book is a great, if dense, survey of the world's languages. As the title says, the book covers only "major languages" (for this reason, the Celtic languages are not included; neither are any Native American languages). The book is very thorough in its subject area (an overview, not a grammar primer). However, there are several negative points. The quality of the chapters, as noted by the two-star reviewer, does vary somewhat (although perhaps not as much as he makes it sound--no chapter is noticeably unprofessional throughout). There is also no unifying phonetic transcription. Some chapters use IPA, others a language-specific representation, and still others none at all. Finally, some chapters seem not to be very well organized (the Sanskrit chapter comes to mind--it contains far too much text and not enough charts or examples). The book also suffers from Euro-centrism, with several sections devoted to the various Indo-European language families of Europe and only one for the IE languages of India. The rest of the book does not seem as well-covered as the Indo-European language chapters.

In response to the complaint about Native American languages, I see both sides: Comrie's intent was to create a description of major languages. Whatever they may be, the Native American languages cannot really be called "major" (although Cherokee, Quechua, and perhaps Nahuatl come close). This is not to say that they do not deserve inclusion, though, so I see where the two-star reviewer was coming from. This does not, however, meant that the book is not worth purchasing--it certainly is.

The only thing I can say negative about this book is that it came out in hardcover first, for nearly $100, and after I bought that, the paperback came out at a third of the price. It is one of only a couple of books for which I was ever willing to pay that much money, and that alone should be a clue as to how much I liked it.

There are chapters on most of the important languages of the world, as well as some of the language families that include these languages. Each chapter is by a different expert (actually, a few people wrote more than one chapter), and so there is some unevenness in the treatment. But in general, each of the single-language chapters gives a relatively detailed summary of the grammar and vocabulary of the language it covers; the language-family chapters describe the common features of languages in the family. The level of detail is not that of a textbook in the language, but rather enough to give someone like myself (interested in linguistics, but not fluent in anything but my own native English) a good feeling for how the language works.

The first book of this type that I ever saw was Mario Pei's "The World's Chief Languages." This book goes into more detail on any individual language than Pei's book did, but covers a smaller number of languages (though more varied ones). It belongs in the library of anyone who wants to know a little bit of how a lot of languages work.

This is easily one of the most useful books a student of linguistics, especially one interested in typology and language variation, could possibly have. I have often turned to it to satisfy my curiosity about a particular language or language family, and I have never been disappointed. The articles, all written by specialists in the language in question, are excellent, the typeface is very pleasant, and the binding is highly durable, suitable for constant use. The only complaint I could make would be about the choice of languages. I realize that only "the world's major languages" were supposed to be covered in this volume, but I would have liked to see an article on a Native American language (say, Quechua), or at least one on Native American languages in general. Aside from that, though, this book is wonderfully complete, and I have found it to be unmatched as a quick reference. It's probably my favorite non-fiction book.