Mind the two P's
http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3738701
Mar 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition
A LANGUAGE is far more than the sum of its parts. It is also a
community of shared history, technology and even aspirations, which is
why Nicholas Ostler's new history is as much about societies as it is
about the languages they speak.
Some readers might have preferred the author, when mining his subject,
to have drilled with a diamond-hard bit rather than going for the
open-cast approach. Thankfully, though, he has set himself two limits.
First, he confines himself to languages with a surviving written
record-ruling out at a stroke the tentative histories of the spread
of Polynesian languages from about 3,000BC and of the Bantu languages
over much of southern Africa from around the same time. Second, he
looks chiefly at languages that were once evidently successful, even
if, eventually, they became extinct.
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
By Nicholas Ostler
HarperCollins; 615 pages; £30. To be published in America by
HarperCollins in July
Linguistics
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Nicholas Ostler
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