Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World [Paperback]

Nicholas Ostler'sEmpires of the Wordis 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.

[A] wide-ranging history of the worlds languages... [Ostler] brilliantly raises questions and supplies answers or theories.Enlightening . . . Always challenging, always instructive--at times, even startling or revolutionary.Delicious! Ostlers book shows how certain lucky languages joined humankind in its spread across the world.What an extraordinary odyssey the author of this superb work embarked upon.Covers more rambunctious territory than any other single volume Im aware of...A wonderful ear for the projects poetry.Revolutionary... Executed with a giddying depth of scholarship, yet the detail is never too thick to swamp the general reader.True scholarship. A marvelous book, learned and instructive.[A] monumental new book... Ostler furnishes many fresh insights, useful historical anecdotes and charming linguistic oddities.A work of immense erudition.A story of dramatic reversals and puzzling paradoxes. A rich... text with many piercing observations and startling comparisons.