{"title":"Gaston Dorren","description":"Gaston Dorren is a linguist, journalist, and polyglot. He speaks Dutch, Limburgish, English, German, French, and Spanish, and reads nine more languages. He is the author of two books in Dutch, and the creator of an app, The Language Lover's Guide to Europe. Dorren lives in the Netherlands.","products":[{"product_id":"lingo-around-europe-in-sixty-languages-paperback","title":"Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhether you're a frequent visitor to Europe or just an armchair traveler, the surprising and extraordinary stories in \u003ci\u003eLingo\u003c\/i\u003e will forever change the way you think about the continent, and may even make you want to learn a new language. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eLingo\u003c\/i\u003e spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent's ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. \u003ci\u003eLingo\u003c\/i\u003e takes us into today's remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word \"you\" in conversation, leading to tiptoeing questions of the form: \"Would herr generaldirektör Rexed like a biscuit?\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSpanning six millenia and sixty languages in bite-size chapters, \u003ci\u003eLingo\u003c\/i\u003e is a hilarious and highly edifying exploration of how Europe speaks.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51376130195679,"sku":"9780802125712","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/4kovRLWirq9780802125712.webp?v=1789214267"},{"product_id":"babel-around-the-world-in-twenty-languages-paperback","title":"Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eEnglish is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). \u003ci\u003eBabel\u003c\/i\u003e whisks the reader on a delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away and showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics or elegant but complicated writing scripts, and mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to the outside world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Among many other things, \u003ci\u003eBabel\u003c\/i\u003e will teach you why modern Turks can't read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate \"dialects\" for men and women. Dorren lets you in on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten widespread myths about Chinese characters, and discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, \u003ci\u003eBabel\u003c\/i\u003e will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51376131604703,"sku":"9780802147806","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/udz9Wh0-vt9780802147806.webp?v=1789214270"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/gaston-dorren.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}