As an amateur language enthusiast/wannabe polyglot, a book
like this is heaven for me. I’m constantly in the mood for starting to learn a
new language, and then I never actually do it, but I have plans, you see. Before reading this book, my plans were, in a
nutshell: touch up (basically re-learn) my German and my Spanish, really lay
into my Swedish (so that I won’t start forgetting it like the other two), and
start either Welsh, Russian, French, Finnish, or maybe all of them at the same
time, who cares, languages are fun! Then I read this book and basically it went
like this:
Chapter 20: Oh hell Vietnamese
seems really interesting! Sure all those diacritics look complicated as hell
but it makes the language look so fun, and it would be way more unique to learn
Vietnamese than Mandarin. Might give this a look later.
Chapter 19: I never in my life thought about learning Korean but now that I’m reading about
it, I’m loving this concept of ’ideophones’ (basically words that imply their
meaning just by how they sound, kind of like onomatopoeias but not exactly).
Maybe it would be worth a try?
Chapter 17: Turkey and Hungary have a lot of history
together, so I already knew that we have a lot of loanwords from Turkish, but somehow I never thought
about how much easier that could make learning the whole language. Plus, I do
want to go to Istanbul at one point, so maybe it’s not such a crazy idea.
Chapter 13: Japanese
used to be on my list back when I was briefly really into anime (I know,
typical), and I never completely lost my interest in the language, even though
now I only occasionally watch anime.
I never knew about this really werid distinction between male and female
Japanese, however, and that seems like the kind of challenge I would like to
take on. Maybe I should put it back on my list.
Chapter 8: Russian
was already on my list but this chapter was one of my favourites. I love
etymology, and this short breakdown of how some complicated-looking Russian
words actually have cognates in English was brilliant, and it only reinforced
my belief that I need to learn Russian one of these days.
Chapter 6: Both the look of Bengali and its system of indicating vowels by attaching different tiny
marks onto its consonents remind me of Sindarin. If I ever bring myself to
learn an Indian language, I’m now almost certain it’s gonna be Bengali.
Chapter 5: The chapter about Arabic was actually a short dictionary of loanwords that made it into
English, but I made tons of notes about words that are even more apparent in
Hungarian. For example, the Arabic word for parrot is apparently ’babagá’,
which somehow morphed into ’popinjay’. But in Hungarian, parrot is actually ’papagáj’,
which is much more similar. Same with kahwa – coffee – kávé, and a few others I
can’t recall right now. Did I mention I love etymology?
Chapter 2: Yep, Mandarin
is exactly as complicated as I suspected. But I got enamored by the part about
compound characters, how one half of them is a clue about meaning and the other
about pronunciation. It makes learning the characters a bit like solving
riddles, and I love a good riddle.
So yeah. It was a journey, with a lot maybes and mights in
there, and I know myself well enough to know that there’s a 90% chance nothing
will ever come of this. But that doesn’t make my time reading this book any
less meaningful or amazing. Even if I don’t actually learn any of these
langauges, I sure learned a lot about them
from Gaston Dorren’s Babel.
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