BABEL SIMPLIFIED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 547, 16 December 1949, Page 13

BABEL SIMPLIFIED

THE WORLD’S CHIEF LANGUAGES, by yy A. Pei;,Allen & Unwin. English price, JAR, which disrupts most studies except severely technical ones, occasionally gives a fillip to true popular scholarship: handbooks and manuals are taken from the shelf, dusted off; and served up in new forms for general use. This American compilation (originally entitled Languages for War and Peace, and apparently designed for extensive service use in many war theatres) first appeared in 1946, and had reached its third edition before it found an English publisher. As it stands, it is a model of clear printing and arrangement, and is undoubtedly the handiest comprehensive elementary introduction to the practical study of spoken language in the world today.

Dr. Pei and his associates are fully aware of the limitations of their method, but this in turn is dictated by their main purpose,. which is to "enable the individual of average linguistic ability to acquire the basic facts about the world’s chief languages, where they are spoken and by whom, to identify them readily, and to handle more than just one of them in a comprehensible and acceptable fashion." The importance of this modest aim hardly needs underlining. The language specialist is well enough provided elsewhere: this is a book for the common reader and world citizen, The key languages selected by Dr. Pei for fuller treatment are English, German, Fr , Spanish, Portuguesé, Italian,.Russian and Japanese. Arabic, Chinese, Malay and Dutch are given secondary treatment; and some fifty remaining languages classified arid briefly illustrated, with samples of their particular scripts. All this is a remarkable achievement in 663 pages-few reference books, for a guinea, will give as much, Criticism, of course, is easy: the New Zealander who lgoks up the special characteristics of his own brand of spoken English may not feel flattered to learn that "the vocabularly often coincides with America’s rather than with Britain’s", and he may seriously question whether the short a is universal in this country (dance perhaps, but not path?), or whether a New Zealander commonly asks for a pack rather than a packet of cigarettes, and mails his letters more often than he posts them. Yet these are trifles, after all. A more serious criticism might be levelled against the choice of (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Japanese rather than Chinese as the representative Far Eastern language-but the difficulties of representing Chinese adequately in a roman text are notorious. The preference given to military terms in vocabulary may not, alas, be entirely mistaken: against this, it is interesting to note, that the standard passages chosen for illustrative and comparative purposes throughout the book are taken from St. John’s Gospel-"since nowhere: else was it possible to obtain, for an entire series of languages, so homogeneous and accurate a set of individual translations." Finally, a word of special commendation for the excellent series of maps showing the world distribution of spoken languages and dialects.

J.

B.