Languages
As an admitted linguaphile and avid reader of non-fiction, I was delighted when I came across two fairly recent books about languages. One of them deals with languages that died out long ago while the other takes a tour of some of the unusual languages that currently teeter on the edge of extinction. Reading them together provided me with an entertaining journey, and also served up a cautionary tale of what we will lose if we continue to allow languages to die out.
In Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts, Andrew Robinson takes the reader on an historical journey, detailing efforts to decipher a dozen different written languages. He opens with a thorough overview of writing systems. civilizations and undeciphered scripts. The diagrams and illustrations in this introduction drew me in and I quickly became fascinated by Robinson's descriptions. Part one, entitled "Three Great Decipherments" chronicles the process of untangling the mysteries of Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Linear B, and Mayan glyphs. The book then continues on to chronicle several important scripts that have yet to be deciphered. I could stare at several of the photos and diagrams of the undeciphered languages for hours, trying to hear the voices of the past. This book provided me with a great deal of knowledge about lost languages of the world and the people and methods involved in trying to crack these ancient codes.
Mark Abley's Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages is completely different. Here, the focus is on the contemporary face of language and the book, as the subtitle suggests, is a travelogue of a journey among threatened languages. The book is made up of several anecdotes and descriptions of languages in danger of extinction today. Abley, a Canadian journalist, limits his coverage to the languages of Australia, North America, and Western Europe. Each chapter stands on its own, and coverage ranges from a language in the Amazon whose last known speaker was a parrot to Australian aboriginal tongues, to the more well known Welsh and Yiddish. With the way English is seemingly taking over the world, this book raises several important issues regarding linguistic diversity and the future of language worldwide. The writing is very accessible and familiar, and the short chapters make it easy to read a little bit at a time.
Lost Languages and Spoken Here both provide food for thought. They are very different in focus, scope and tone. One chronicles the process of rediscovering languages of the past while the other showcases effortd to save languages for the future. Read together or apart, these books tell the story of a very important aspect of our global culture--how we describe and communicate with the world around us.