Speak: A Short History of Languages

by Tore Janson

Book Overview

This book is a history of human speech from prehistory to the present. It charts the rise of some languages and the fall of others, explaining why some survive and others die. It shows how languages change their sounds and meanings, and how the history of languages is closely linked to the history of peoples.

Writing in a lively, readable style, distinguished Swedish scholar Tore Janson makes no assumptions about previous knowledge. He takes...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199263418
• ISBN13: 9780199263417
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 310 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.7" x 4.7"

Customer Reviews

An important subject of human evolution and history

Fantastic!. I have had the opportunity to deal with people from different nationalities, from India, China/Taiwan, Great Britain/USA, France and Brasil and by obvious reasons you learn a little bit about those languages, noticing the marked pronunciations and accents, that makes you wonder about the nature of any specific language. This entertaining book provide insights about how language is created, evolve into others forms and sometimes how they cease to exist. There are reference to mostly all languages and it was fascinating to know little aspects of Africa's languages, the evolution of latin into the romance languages and the story of English. Spanish is my first language and when comparing it with portuguese there is no much difference in the writing -- portuguese is like castilian but badly written (with all due respect) -- the major difference is in the phonetic, so everytime I need to speak to someone portuguese, we ended up speaking english to better understand each other. English is my second language and I think this language have some advantages compared to other languages, for example, most of the books written by the best scholars and scientists come in English so in my case it was important to know this language in order to read this great book and other books that are only published in English.

Good overview of the history of some languages

Tore Janson's "Speak" is a succinct, readable overview of the history of languages, focusing primarily on English and Western languages. This is a well-written, informative book. Janson starts by giving a brief overview of the development of languages, including mentioning one of his major themes of the book - a language is only a language if its speakers recognize it as such. He then traces the history of the Mesopotamian languages, Greek, Latin, and then the modern European languages, finally devoting a chapter to English's current dominance in the world. Finally, Janson concludes with a short chapter on the possible future development of languages. John McWhorter's "Power of Babel" is the only comparable book that I have read. McWhorter is a little more entertaining and explains the actual dynamics of language change better, but Janson's story is more structured, linear and complete. This book is a good overview of the history of language for a layman.