Babel #1: South-East Asian Languages
There are around 6,000 languages in the world, writes Gaston Dorren in Babel . His book covers the top 20 spoken languages in an unsystematic manner. Understandable, since nobody can analyze so many diverse languages in the same way. That approach results in very different info about the languages. ~~ He tried learning Vietnamese (#20, 75 million speakers). Strangely, it uses the Roman script, even though 30 to 60% of its vocabulary comes from Chinese! It has an abnormally high diacritics (symbols on top of letters e.g. ć, ĉ, č, ē etc). Unlike English, its spellings match the pronunciations – thanks to all those diacritics. Like many East Asian languages, it is highly tonal (different vocalizations can change the meaning of words significantly). And like many Asian languages, there are lots of different personal pronouns – use the wrong one and you are being disrespectful. ~~ At #16, with 95 million speakers, comes Javanese . Never heard of it? That’s probabl...