Jamie Smith's Reviews > Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe

An actual linguist would probably be turned off by the superficiality of this book, but for readers with a general interest in languages it can be fun. Every language has a history, and all have some features which seem perfectly normal to native speakers, but that come across as quirks when translated into English.

Take the case of Italian and its plethora of diminutives, pejoratives, augmentatives, and affectives. In Latin nouns had only one diminutive, so domina (woman) / dominula (small woman). Simple enough, but the evolution to modern Italian added a number of new ones to express subtle nuances, so today there is donnina, donnetta, and donnicina. Suffixes can even be piled on one after the other, so donnettaccia: is a woman, “ett” makes her small, and “acci” unpleasant.

English, on the other hand, has one primary diminutive: -ie, as in sweet / sweetie, but there are also a number of words which started as diminutives but are no longer recognized as such, as in kitten (a small cat) and darling (a small dear). The author also uses the example of buttock as half of a full sized butt, but when I checked this against the word history at etymonline[dot]com I did not get that sense. However, I found that butt in the sense of “butt heads” comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhau meaning “to strike”, and is present today in words such as button, halibut, turbot, and rebut. The fact that I find this interesting goes a long way to explaining why I was reading this book in the first place.

The book also mentions, as an aside, that Scandinavian languages do not have diminutives at all, but did not elaborate further.

And here’s a random fact I found interesting: “the word ‘million’ is...fairly young – literally meaning ‘a big thousand’, it was formed by taking the Italian word for a thousand, mille, and adding the suffix -one, meaning big.”

The author complains about the multiplicity of vowel sounds in English, and he has a point: “The main nuisance about English vowels is that there are so many of them. If you’re British, you’ll agree that the vowels following the p are different in each item of this list: par, pear, peer, pipe, poor, power, purr, pull, poop, puke, pin, pan, pain, pen, pawn, pun, point, posh, pose, parade. That makes twenty different vowels (including the so-called gliding ones, such as oi and the long i and u).” However, perhaps he doth protest too much. He himself is Dutch, and in Mariano Sigman’s book The Secret Life of the Mind he writes that Spanish has five vowel sounds, French up to seventeen (including nasals), but Dutch has forty, yes forty. English seems like a model of simplicity by comparison.

There are sixty short chapters, each focusing on one of Europe’s languages. The tone is light and breezy and there are lots of interesting little factoids. For example, after giving a one-paragraph history of Malta, the author writes, “And so Malta today is a Catholic island with a Semitic (hence Afro-Asiatic) language that’s written in the Latin script (unlike all other Semitic languages) and looks a lot like Italian, except for the odd ż and ħ, which are typical of Polish and Serbian respectively.” In discussing the phonetic consistency of Finnish he reminds us “Those who learn English as a foreign language are forced to grapple endlessly with its illogical rules. Photograph is stressed on the first syllable, photography on the second and photographic on the third. Finnish, however, stresses words on the first syllable.” Finally, the author points out something that I noticed when I reviewed an Esperanto grammar book (q.v.): it’s not as simple and straightforward as you might have heard,

What makes Esperanto such a challenge for Anglophones? First of all, it has a case system. When a man does something in Esperanto, he is a viro: la viro vidas hundon, ‘the man sees a dog’. But when the roles are reversed, he turns into a viron: la hundo vidas viron, ‘the dog sees a man’. (The dog, you will notice, undergoes the same transformation.) This may not be awfully difficult, but it takes a lot of getting used to for those of us not accustomed to cases – that is, nearly everyone north, west and south of Germany. (And for speakers of French, Italian and Spanish, la viro sounds plain wrong. Il viro or el viro would be OK – but la viro? Why the sex change?)

The book if full of things like that, interesting, but with no practical value unless you aspire to always be the boringest person at every party. [Wait, that reminds me: here’s a completely unrelated stream of consciousness aside: in his book 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War, Charles Emmerson writes of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who craved adulation, that he was “a man who sought to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”]

Each chapter ends with a footnote that shows some of the words English has picked up from the language being discussed, if any. For instance, English added ‘slew’, ‘galore’, and ‘trousers’ from Irish, but there are no loanwords from Albanian, although the note points out the country’s currency, the lek, is named after Alexander the Great.

So, this book is a lot of fun. It is a quick read, and many of its chapters are only a few pages long, so it fits easily into bite-size pieces of reading time. If you have a layman’s interest in languages this will fit the bill nicely.