The Languages of the World 3rd Edition

i love this book, i’ve been tearing through it! while it may be a little old (2003) it still stands up. the only thing that has changed since publication is the statistics of speakers (because populations have changed) but nevertheless this book is very interesting and also helpful. when you can’t remember something about a language’s classification or writing/etc this book has the answer!

This study gives you really interesting details of the roots and development of many languages. Highly interesting.

"The Languages of the World" was obviously a labor of love on the part of its author, the late Kenneth Katzner. I first bought the Second Edition several years ago, and was fascinated by the tidbits of information that it offered up. However, the Third Edition (published just a year before Katzner's death) has some shortcomings and outright mistakes in it that I hope some future editor of a Fourth Edition might address. One example of a shortcoming is that Katzner often leaves plenty of blank space after many of his entries--space that could well be used to give a more detailed description of the language in question, such as grammatical structure. And one example of an outright mistake that I caught was that the author writes that the "double-s" (ß) in German was abolished in a spelling reform of the year 1998. In fact, this particular letter is still used, but the spelling reform has decreed that it should only be used when the preceding vowel is long. Therefore, it is no longer used in the word "dass" ("that," in the sense of "He said that..."), but it is still used in words like Straße (street) and "Außerdem" ("Besides that,..."). That said, if a future editor does put out a Fourth Edition, he/she could correct some of Katzner's errors and add more detailed information in the individual entries. All in all though, "The Languages of the World" is a wonderful introduction to its eponymous subject for the lay reader; and my biggest regret is that Kenneth Katzner is no longer with us.

Great book about languages.

If you want a paragraph per language describing how many people speak it and what the alphabet looks like, buy this book. If you really want anything of educational value, forget it. You will waste your money as I did. The description is very misleading. You think it will actually teach you about the development of world languages. It does not. The info included could probably be found easily on the internet for free! It is just trivia.

I would prefer more technical linguistic descriptions

I bought this book 20 years ago as I found the subject fascinating. I wasn't wanting to *learn* a language with this book, nor know the history of one particular language. But just being able to peruse hundreds of languages - both major and obscure - was fascinating to me. Each language doesn't take more than a page or two, and he gives a short paragraph of the language in its native alphabet, along with its translation in English. Then he gives some facts about that particular language.I would say that this book is for someone who would like to know information about many of the world's languages without actually diving into one in particular. I discovered things like the beauty of the Burmese alphabet, and how many Native American/Indian languages existed in North America (well over 100) before the Europeans came. Some languages have less than 10 living speakers. Languages are divided in the book by continent, also. It's an excellent reference book to see the alphabet and grammar of a specific language, along with some narrative. Like I said, I bought this book over 20 years ago, and I never regretted it.

Kenneth Katzner provides a well written and concisely presented book for those interested in the world's languages, their origins, growth and transformations, and linguistic relatives. The languages are listed by familial grouping, then individual languages, and then nation by nation. Easy-to-read charts elucidating families, sub-groups, branches, and major and minor languages are listed in the front of the book. Individually, the languages are listed in the index in the back of the book in alphabetical order making them easy to find and cross-reference. One can quickly find which languages are related via sub-families. You can bounce around from page to page with this.Each language listed is presented with a sample such as a poem or proverb followed by an English transliteration. Also included is the number of people who speak it, and in what different parts of the world. The languages' family, idiocyncracies, major grammar points, alphabet, and stresses are noted. As an example, here's a paraphrase of the Finnish language presented in the book:Spoken by 5 million speakers in Finland, 70,000 in the U.S., 200,000 in Sweden and 50,000 in Russia. Finnish is one of the few languages in Europe that is not of the Indo-European languages family. Like Estonian, it belongs to the Finno-Ugric languages which are a branch derived from the Uralic family. Finnish is difficult language to learn for Western native speakers because of it's non Indo-European origins and the the fact that it has 15 noun cases.Also in the beginning is a biography of the families of languages and explanations of the migrations of people, many thousands of years ago, that has created the current multi-varied linguistic make up of our world today.