Language, that strangest and most beautiful of things

Language, that beautiful and very strange thing which seperates us from animals, turning sounds into words to communicate what we are, what we want. To understand languages and where they are from is to understand who we are and what we are.

Here are two excellent resources about this most fascinating of subjects, the first a wonderful book, the second an amazing BBC TV series:

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World + Fry’s Planet Word

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

- Synopsis

An unusual and authoritative ‘natural history of languages’ that narrates the ways in which one language has superseded or outlasted another at different times in history.

The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together, and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it.

Yet the history of the world’s great languages has rarely been examined. ‘Empires of the Word’ is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations — in education, culture and diplomacy — devised by speakers in the Middle East; the uncanny resilience of Chinese throughout twenty centuries of invasions; the progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the struggle that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English.

Besides these epic achievements, language failures are equally fascinating: why did Germany get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed’s Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, given that the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India?

As this book engagingly reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real characters of peoples; it also shows that the language of the future will, like the languages of the past, be full of surprises.

Fry’s Planet Word

Fry’s Planet Word is a documentary series about language. Written and presented by Stephen Fry, the first of five hour-long episodes was broadcast on 25 September 2011 on BBC HD. More info via wikipedia

1 – Babel

Focusing on the origins of language with topics covered including:

• The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and communication between primates
• The Turkana language
• The FOXP2 gene and its effect on language
• Brain patterns from an MRI scan while talking
• Victor of Aveyron, feral children, and language acquisition (discussion with psycholinguist Steven Pinker)
• The wug test by Jean Berko Gleason
• The Klingon language and how d’Armond Speers taught it as the first language to his son
• Sign language
• The Tower of Babel
• Philology, the Proto-Indo-European language, and Grimm’s law
• Working languages and official languages of the United Nations

2 – Identity

Focusing on how one identifies through language

• Regional accents of English through Yorkshire and Newcastle upon Tyne (discussion with poet Ian McMillan)
• Multilingualism
• Jewish humour and the Yiddish language
• Language death and globalisation
• Irish language and the Connacht Irish dialect on Ros na Rún
• Basque language and cuisine
• The loss of the Occitan language and its Provençal dialect
• The Académie française and inventing new French words
• The Maghreb French dialect’s effect on standard French
• Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language as a modern language (discussion with linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann)
• Kenya‘s Turkana people and the use of English, Swahili, and Turkana

3 – Uses and Abuses

The evolution of slang and profanity

• Common sources of obscenities in the Turkana and English languages
• “Fuck“, Tourette syndrome, and coprolalia
• Swearing and the basal ganglia
• Brian Blessed, the Stroop effect, and swearing’s effect on pain
• The Thick of It and Armando Iannucci
• The ban of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• Stephen K. Amos and racial and sexual epithets
• Euphemisms and weasel words
• Omid Djalili and the Persian politeness of taarof
• Euphemism and dysphemism in the hospital
• Polari in Round the Horne
• Teenagers and slang at Berkeley High School
• Hip hop and popular media on the growth of language
• El Général and the Tunisian revolution

4 – Spreading the Word

The history of written language, from the earliest writing to blogging and tweeting

• The Akha people of Thailand who have no written language
• Cuneiform, the history of bureaucracy, and the Epic of Gilgamesh
• Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone
• Classical Greece, Homer, the Phoenicians, and the alphabet
• Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the resilience of Judaism by means of the Hebrew alphabet
• The Dome of the Rock and the spread of the Arabic script with Islam
• The Dead Sea Scrolls and the oldest record of the Ten Commandments
• Printing and its roots in China
• The complexities of Written Chinese with David Tang and Johnson Chang
• The development of pinyin during the Cultural Revolution
• Typography, the development of the book, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the standardisation of the English language
• The democratisation of reading, the Age of Enlightenment, and Denis Diderot‘s Encyclopédie
• The Bodleian Library and the digitisation of information
• Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia project
• Social media and the Arab Spring
• Belle de Jour and the lure of blogging
• Hanif Kureishi and the evolution of the book, Robert Coover and electronic literature, and the researchers at the MIT Media Lab

5 – The Power and the Glory

The influence of storytelling and literature on language

• The Turkana people and their rivalry with the Toposa people
• Plot with William Goldman and his Marathon Man
• Homer‘s Odyssey and Iliad
• James Joyce‘s Ulysses with David Norris
• J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the works of Stephen King with Peter Jackson
• William Shakespeare and the emphasis on character
• Hamlet with Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant, Brian Blessed, and Mark Rylance
• Shakespeare in French with Guillaume Gallienne of the Comédie-Française and in Mandarin Chinese with David Tang and Johnson Chang
• P. G. Wodehouse and with Robert McCrum
• George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four, its Newspeak, and business speak with Ian Hislop
• W. H. Auden‘s “Funeral Blues“, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Coldplay‘s “Fix You” with Richard Curtis
• Bob Dylan‘s music with Christopher Ricks