Product Description

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises.

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Product Details

Publisher	Harper Perennial
ISBN	0060935723
Features	ISBN13: 9780060935726 Condition: New Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Format	Paperback
Author	Nicholas Ostler
EAN	9780060935726
Label	Harper Perennial
Dewey Decimal Number	409
Studio	Harper Perennial
Number Of Pages	640
Title	Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Release Date	2006-06-27
Publication Date	2006-07-01
Manufacturer	Harper Perennial

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Customer Reviews

One of the very best.

Review by Leo J. Moser, 2010-06-30

This book is one of the very best accounts of history from the dimension of language. Should be required reading for all interested in world history.

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review of Empires of the Word

Review by Edward A. Nickerson, 2010-05-24

This is a profoundly important book. It outlines, as no other book has that I have seen, the way languages work in human history. It opens vast areas of knowledge about language that most of us, even if we have studied linguistics as I have, did not know of. How is it that the Spanish spread their language over huge areas in the New World, but the French did not succeed in turning England into a Francophone country after the Norman conquest? Why is Sanskrit so respected, and so little spoken? How do languages grow, spread, and die?

I recommend this book unreservedly.


Edward A, Nickerson

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should be "A Language history of the WEST"

Review by Sai Li, 2010-01-30

first of all, i admit that it is a magnificent book with decent introduction to Western language history, and i did learn a lot from this book. however, when it talks about eastern part of the WORLD, the author just shows his lack of basic knowledge and even some writing from wiki is better than this.

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Boring!

Review by D. Cossio, 2009-09-26

this book is really boring I bought it for a class and I totally hate reading it. I'm half way through and I'm only on ch.5! The chapters are soooooooooo!!!! long! its riddiculous! this is a pretty thick book and it has really small writting! The author just talks over and over again about the same thing! Don't recommend it to read just for fun but if it is for a class then goodluck!

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Unreadable

Review by Jacqueline, 2009-08-24

This book is very advanced and I feel I should caution anyone purchasing this book at an undergraduate level. The author goes straight into advanced material without providing any background information. The names of ancient cities, languages and peoples are spewed out one after another and the way the text is written seems to assume the reader has an extensive knowledge of geography (ever heard of Ugarit, Karkemish or Qatna?). New places and topics are introduced randomly within the same paragraph, and even the same sentence!

Sample of text: "The Hittites, flourishing from the sixteenth to the thirteenth century BC, created a massively literate civilization, and the royal library at Hattusas, discovered in modern Bogaz Koy, 150 kilometres west of Ankara, contains materials not only in Hittite and Akkadian, but also in Hurrian, Luwian, and Palaic, interspersed here and there with phrases in Hattic, Sumerian and the Indo-Aryan language of Mitannian aristocracy" (41).

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