Re: Basque & Katzner's Languages of the World
| From: | Josh Roth <fuscian@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, November 14, 2001, 23:46 |
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In a message dated 11/14/01 5:18:53 PM, yl112@CORNELL.EDU writes:
>I picked up _Languages of the World_ by Kenneth Katzner a few weeks ago.
>It's an interesting, *very* breezy survey of world languages, probably
>not
>really useful linguistically (the author works for the U.S. federal gov't)
>. In particular, I wish his phonological descriptions (which are very
>anglocentric, perhaps not surprisingly) had used IPA instead of fuzzy
>things like "There is both a soft r and a hard r" in Basque. Which brings
>me to my question: for those who know (something about) Basque, what the
>heck is he talking about? Trilled and non-trilled? Trilled vs.
>approximant? Meep?
Can't help you there :-( Guess he's trying to appeal to a wider audience by
not being technical. (In other words, rather than exclude some people, he
exludes everyone by being unclear. Alas....) Or he could just not know any
IPA. Then again, if you're gonna write a whole book on languages, you could
put a little effort into learning some IPA....
>The other thing I like about this book, and the real reason I picked it
>up
>even though I'm sort of skeptical of its academic usefulness, is the
>samples of text that he includes. Some are pretty uninteresting (yet
>another biblical translation into whatever non-Indo-European language),
>but there are some lovely poems/passages/script samples, including my
>favourite Korean poem, Kim Seowol's "Chindallae" (azaleas), with
>translations.
I like that one too. In fact it inspired me (a few years back) to borrow the
Korean word for water, 'mul,' into Eloshtan as 'mulo' /"mUlV/ :-)
Unfortunately the book doesn't contain even one Papuan, Aboriginal, or
Nilo-Saharan language. But it did give me my first exposure to many others.
Where else would I ever have seen Sibo writing, or Bushman? I've still never
seen anything else on these (maybe there's another name for Bushman? The
Ethnologue isn't too helpful here).
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html
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