These books won't be flat for long!

[muckefuck]

When I got asked a couple weeks back some leading questions about what books I wanted, I expected to see one or two show up last weekend. I got five. I say I feel spoiled would be an understatement. In no particular order:

1. Baldi, Philip. The foundations of Latin--I fell in love with this book when I cataloged it many years ago now. In traces the development of Latin from the earliest attestations up until the twilight of the Classical Period with a clarity and readability that most specialist writers can only dream of.
2. Abley, Mark. Spoken here : travels among threatened languages--This got consistently good reviews from my philoglottic peers and it's not hard to see why. Already my eyes have misted over twice reading it, and I've barely completed one chapter. monshu confessed to sneaking more than a peek while it was squirreled away at his workplace.
3. Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the word--Finally, a work that slices through all this "English is the world language because it outcompeted the others on its merits" bullshit and presents the real reasons why some tongues became linguas francas and others faded into oblivion.
4. Pulleyblank, Edwin G. Lexicon of reconstructed pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin--Exactly what the title says it is. In other words, a book only a geek like me could love.
5. Tyler, Royall (comp.). Japanese Tales--Just the thing to provoke a few shivers among the dog days of summer, in the time-honoured Japanese tradition.

Comments

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Ostler quite a bit. I've added the Baldi to my to-get list. (Quick check... Yes! It's still in print.)

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Another vote for Ostler.

(I'm also really enjoying Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language, which has insights I haven't seen elsewhere.)

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Another good one, yes.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I love Empires of the Word, even though someone munged the Portuguese sentence examples, dammit.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

the real reasons why some tongues became linguas francas and others faded into oblivion

recently I've seen some hand-wringing from Dutch sources, saying their language is disappearing because they're too damn cosmopolitan - they'd rather be understood in English than not in Dutch.

Um, yes. That's called Empire, too.