I was taking notes at first. Then, I was running out of time on my loan from the library and had to get creative with my reading time. This book was interesting and made me appreciate some of these languages more. Though it was entertaining, there were parts where it felt like the author was birdwalking to the point I forgot what language I was reading about. I may read it again at a later date when I finally have a firm grasp on my second (or third) language.

Un libro interesante que me hace reavivar mi amor por las lenguas y entender parte de las complejidades propias de cada una.

I learned something from each of the chapters and thought I'd share here:

Vietnamese
Vietnamese has 9 different diacritics. Sometimes multiple are used on the same letter. (19-20)

Pronouns and other word choices are many. It fits a person into a hierarchy; the author was older than his language teacher so she called him bác (uncle) and he called her cháu (niece). (Used on many pages)

Korean
Korean has no genders and is not a tonal language. (36)

Sound symbolism and ideophones are a huge part of Korean. (Gen Thought)

I didn't realize Korean had an alphabet! (50)

Tamil
I didn’t even recognize the name of this language.

The language is literally a goddess. And so when its speakers, mostly in south India and Sri Lanka, found it suppressed and themselves oppressed it was a dual oppression; linguistic and religious. (Gen Thought)

Turkish
After the multiethnic Ottoman Empire collapsed, "In a mere two generations, Turkish underwent the sort of evolution that took four centuries for English." (74)
And that change was a top-down change due to a dictator. It's so changed that Turns today can't read their country's ancient literature.

Javanese
The rules governing formality are so complex, the word choice depends on how old you are or how much power you have in relation to the person you’re speaking with, that when the Dutch left Indonesia, even though Javanese was spoken by more people than any language in the archipelago, the newly united country chose Malay as the national language. (93)

Persian
The Persian Empire went through many changes and so did the language. It wasn’t until Bahram V (420-438 CE) that the Persian language (today Farsi or Iranian) was even written down. (103)

The fear conservative Americans have about immigrants fundamentally changing English, isn’t unrealistic. The language Iranians speak today was fundamentally changed by immigrants brought in to help construction projects. Though it took centuries to solidify. (105)

Punjabi
This entire chapter is exploring why there is even a controversy over whether or not Punjabi is a tonal language. It has diacritics a-plenty, usually a sign of a tonal language, but native speakers don’t see it that way. They see it as almost accents. (General Thought)

Japanese
Men and women speak differ "genderlects". The way they use the language differs. (129)

Swahili
It’s the only African language in the top 20. (144)

It has more secondary than primary speakers. It serves as a lingua franca in the astoundingly multilingual area of Eastern and Southern Africa. It’s not uncommon for people to know, and use, three languages regularly (gen thought)

German
With weird rules for word order German scores very high on the language weirdness scale as scored by https://wals.info (gen thought)

French
Another one with more secondary than primary speakers, in fact only 80 of 250 million are primary.

Like English of London winning our over other dialects centuries ago, the French of Paris won, too.

So fervent do the powers that be fight to keep French pure that dialects are looked down upon too.

Malay
Though a minority language, when Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands, it chose Malay as the national language because it was easier to learn, while at the same time telling peeps to keep their mother tongue too. A rare case of language unifying! (Gen thought)

Russian
While not all Indo-European languages are always very similar, English and Russian are very different. You have to go back 5000 years to find words that have cognates…to Indo-European itself. (Gen thought)

Portuguese
The variety in Brazil is spoken so differently than that in Portugal that if you want to learn the language, you have to choose one. (218)

Ninety-five percent of speakers live outside of Portugal. (220)

Bengali
This was all about scripts since Bengali has what's called a abugidas; a script that has only vowel signs attached to the consonants. It's in-between an alphabet, which has vowels and consonants, and an abjad, which has only consonants no vowels. Hebrew is one of these. (239)

Arabic
The Koran is written in Modern Standard Arabic, which is rarely spoken. Spoken Arabic has dialects as different as Romance languages. (257)

Hindi-Urdu
The two languages aren't really separate, they're part of what's my favorite phrase of the chapter, a dialect continuum. Hindi is what's spoken by Hindus in India and Pakistan, Urdu by Muslims. (Gen thought)

The religious separation between the languages played a role in Gandhi's assassination. He wanted Hindi to be the language of India and that was one of the reasons Nathuram Godse killed him. (283)

Spanish
This chapter got into the weeds of rules and grammar. My eyes were glazing over. (Gen thought)

There are two verbs that can mean "to be". While not always the case, one usually has to do with temporary and the other with permanent. A funny choice is using the temp one when saying someone is dead. (293)

Mandarin
It's no longer common to write in columns from right to left. Now it's rows left to right. Like us. (303)

You can have a compound character, where two characters, one semantic and one phonetic, combine to make a single word or a compound word, where two characters make a two word, um, word. The example for the former was the characters for woman and horse meaning mother and the latter was the characters for oak and tree giving you oak tree. (310)

Japanese writing
Kimono literally means "a thing to put on." (318)

The script takes Chinese characters and the manipulates them. There are three sets, Kanji, the original Chimes, and two Kana, modified characters. But wait there's more, it also take the Roman alphabet, mostly for acronyms like SMS. (323-4)

English
Lingua Francas usually follow military and/or economic dominance. But this may be the first time that doesn't happen. China is an economic giant but the language is so damn hard that it may not achieve lingua franca status. (334-5)

Books about lots of languages are right up my alley, so that’s good. But this book is highly uneven. If the chapters had been a little more parallel, it would have been much improved. Still, I did learn a lot and enjoyed it.