Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World | 
pickFascinating look at languages through history which spread because other people wanted or had to learn them such as Chinese, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Greek, and Spanish. After looking at why different languages persisted in being spoken by a large number of people over a wide area, the author tries to predict whether English is here to stay as the current no. 1 international language.
pickI truly loved this book. It quenched my thirst for history, linguistics and excellent writing. Ostler is Oxford-educated in Greek, Latin, philosophy and economics and studied under Noam Chomsky at MIT, earning a PhD in linguistics and Sanskrit.
Basically, the book is a phenomenal biography of language. Ostler is an expert and the facts/anecdotes he discusses are fascinating. I enjoyed EVERY part and learned a million things. 👍🏼 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Rumination on the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are fully formed from the earliest samples we have.
I‘ve been slowly reading this book in the background for months and it is so, so interesting. I keep learning fascinating things that make me want to pick up other nonfiction books and learn more about these people and regions. Sequoya sounds like a real cool guy 😂
The Master said:
Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.
Confucius, Lúnyū (Analects), ii.15
“Queen Cleopatra was also the first to learn Egyptian — and that apparently only because she had a passion for languages. ‘... few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac, Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in their Macedonian.‘” CLEOPATRA, nerd queen of my❤️
“By the dawn of their recorded histories they were already established over the central zone of the lands where they were spoken. Each maintained this position of solidarity and basically unchanging dominance for an awesome period of over three thousand years, or more than 120 generations.”
— on the similarities between Egyptian and Chinese. This book is so. interesting. 🔥🔥
Wow, this is so interesting. 🧐
When the library of Nineveh was excavated in 1845, researchers found evidence of researchers translating Sumerian texts into Akkadian, in the seventh century BC 😧
I get so heartbroken when I think of the books we‘ve lost! This quote regards Phoenician. If you ❤️ language or ancient history in general, I would HIGHLY recommend Empires of the Word! 🗺
Over half the languages in the world have fewer than five thousand speakers, and over a thousand have under a dozen. This is a parlous time for languages.
Languages guard our memories.
