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The Amazon Store at MillionDollarPetPix.com ( In association with Amazon.com )Empires of the Word: A Language History of the Worldby: Nicholas Ostler  List Price: $17.95 Amazon.com's Price: $12.21 You Save: $5.74 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 409 EAN: 9780060935726 ISBN: 0060935723 Label: Harper Perennial Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 640 Publication Date: July 01, 2006 Publisher: Harper Perennial Release Date: June 27, 2006 Studio: Harper Perennial Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Product Description: Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - One Piece MissingGreat book but missing one key element. Had Ostler started this book with his discussion of communications technologies, now on p. 511-512, and added a clear theory of information costs over time, the book would have hung together much better. We'd now be calling him the Adam Smith of his business. As the great economic historian Harold Innis demonstrated in "Empire and Communications" (University of Toronto Press, Introduction by Marshall McLuhan), language is part of the technological ... Read More Rating:  - not (really) for linguistsIntended to be, as the author states in the last page, a study in diachronic sociolinguistics (that is a study of the varying social ranks and uses of several world languages through time) this ponderous essay will probably bear interest for the non specialists because it is well researched and nearly everywhere clear. Quite often I found myself thinking about a well written article for a quality magazine aimed at educated readers. Mr Ostler does not include every language, just those ... Read More Rating: - Fascinating, But Probably Tough Going for the Average ReaderOstler's survey of how languages spread and change and why some languages take root while others wither and die is really interesting. BUT... I have a B.A. in Linguistics, I study the history of ancient Rome and Greece and of Europe in the Middle Ages for fun, and I found this book tough going. Ostler covers a large time span, going from the beginnings of written words to the present, and a fair chunk of geography (Asia, the Middle East, Eastern and Western Europe, the Americas and North Africa). The ... Read More Rating:  - Slow and ploddingWell, so it seems I am going to be in the minority in stating my general dissatisfaction of this book. It is hard for me to pin down exactly why I didn't like it. Perhaps it was the fact that for the first hundred pages, it was hard to track the authors point. I've know enough to know that if you don't track the text early on, just give it a little while, read some more, and you'll usually get in gear. But that just did not happen here. I found the style of narrative confusing, ... Read More Rating: - An excellent linguistic survey covering major languagesI could not put this book down until, disappointed, I ran out of pages to read. Dr. Ostler's book perfectly combined my greatest interests--history and linguistics. I do wish there had been a bit more depth in his treatment of Arabic, the "single hyperlanguage community" and something about its influence on Latin-origin Spanish (comparable to the influence of Norman French on Germanic English). My only quibbles (I'm an editor and can't help it) is that Dr. Ostler didn't comment, on page 378, the strong influence ... Read More 
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