All,
Short version: I am looking for the definitive book on the history of European languages which will give the broadest possible background to someone with general interest in peoples, history, cultures, and languages, but without extensive *a priori *knowledge of the field or the time to devote to becoming a linguist.
Long version: I am a scientist, generally well-read, and interested in the history of science, and history in general. Many of my interests have converged to the point where a more general knowledge of languages would be useful:
As a biologist (and for science in general), many concepts and developments are clearer with a general feel for Greek and Latin word origins (hell, as a general English speaker, Greek, Latin, German, and French knowledge is very helpful). My work involves taxonomy, so more Greek and Latin, plus the perusal of species descriptions published over the last three centuries in Latin, Spanish, Russian, German, French, and Italian; thus, I have acquired the ability to transliterate and/or limited site-read some of these on a general-concept level. (I was recently in Vienna, and was able to get along fairly well reading signs just based on general feel and familiarity, and can get general meaning out of, say, Dante.)
I love Tolkien, and his works contain concepts derived from Old English, Germanic, Welsh, Finnish, Semitic, Runic, etc. Moreover, I love history, the history of science, and the classics; Einstein, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, Bede, Chaucer, Beowulf, Dante, Goethe, Virgil, Homer, Plato, Aristotle–not that I need to read all of them in the original, but seeing the originals and being able to get something out of them is very interesting. And, of course, the beginnings of Western civilization are all about Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Phoenician, Sumerian, etc.
I’m of Irish heritage and enjoy Celtic folk music, and am thus interested in Irish, Manx, Brenton, etc. My other ancestry is German/Austrian/Polish, and so I’m interested in Germanic and Slavic. I have several Dutch friends, and have considered learning Dutch/German on the theory that they may be the easiest second language for a native English speaker to learn, as they are the most closely related.
However, other than the gestalt intuitive feeling I’ve gotten for recognizing similar words and concepts across related languages, I have no training in linguistics. Two years of high school Spanish, and that’s it (thank you, Mr. Rios). I don’t know a morpheme from a fricative. As a grad student with two jobs, I also have no time to read a dozen linguistics books. So what I’m looking for is a book on, I guess, the history, structure, relationship, similarity, and rules of Indo-European languages, and languages in general, written for non-specialists and providing as much in-depth detail as possible without being overwhelmingly dense. I mean, I’m the kind of nerd who read Simon Winchester’s The Map That Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, and The Meaning of Everything and got jealous of the 19th Century polymaths who knew a dozen languages. Someone in TMTCtW said that after you learn your first dozen languages, you can pick up any additional language in two weeks. I’m hoping that if you start at the beginning, you can get a feel for all of the Indo-European languages that followed.
It may be naïve for a monolingualist to say, but most language-learning courses I’ve seen seem pretty flawed–they give you a list of words and phrases to memorize when it seems to me that the way to learn a language is to learn its alphabet, structure, and rules first. When I look at a German language course, all I can do is wonder why the articles are “das” here and “ein” there.
So, a hypothetical excerpt from the book I’m looking for would be:
“The Phoenician language had 22 letters because they apparently hadn’t discovered vowels or the letter F. The Greeks borrowed their alphabet and named it ‘alphabet’ and said ‘let’s have 24 letters, and you know what, let’s have some vowels. Also, we’d like to be able to say “ffff,” so let’s have Phi’. And they also invented something called ‘digamma’, which looked a lot like F, but was only used for the number six. And the Romans said, ‘Greek looks pretty good, but let’s split C’s from K’s’. And someone thought spelling ‘Iulius’ with an I was pretty stupid, so they invented the J. Then the Icelanders got it, and decided they needed some On-Beyond-Zebra letters, so they thought up the thorn. And somewhere in there St. Cyril came along and convinced half of Europe to turn their letters backwards and upside down. Also, some Germans made some weird-looking letters of their own, because they were Dwarves from Khazad-Dum…” Etc.
I generally have a pretty good knack at being able to find the important works in a field, through knowing the history of the field, the big names therein, and the terminology. However, lacking knowledge in all three of these areas for this particular topic, my searches have been pretty haphazard and fruitless. The most promising book I’ve found so far is this:
But I don’t know and can’t tell if it’s: a) the book on the field, b) likely to answer the questions posed above, or c) the type that a generally educated novice could use. Any insight on the subject would be appreciated!
(I’m also very interested in Oriental languages, but that’s a whole different problem!)
-b
