Ask the Author: Gaston Dorren

“If you want to ask me something about Lingo, go ahead. ” Gaston Dorren

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Gaston Dorren Hi Michael, thanks for your question.
I'm aware that this can seem strange. The thing is, the cover shown on Goodreads is an early draft, with errors in *all four* non-Latin words. Fortunately, the cover that was published is correct.
It so happens that the Russian word for Babel actually is Vavilon, with the stress on the final syllable. This is because Russian, borrowed the Greek form (Βαβυλών), and in Greek, the pronunciation of beta at some point in history shifted from /b/ to /v/. The name of the writer Isaac Babel, on the other hand, is spelt Исаак Бабель, with two b's.
Gaston Dorren I suppose that if I wrote fiction, I would suffer from writer's block a lot. But since I do non-fiction, the sheer amount of fascinating stuff out there waiting to be written about keeps me going without a hitch. The only block that I can imagine stopping me is the inscribed slab of stone that will sit on top of me at some point in the future.
Gaston Dorren I am working on a book about just twelve languages which, together with English, are spoken by over half the world population. They represent a baker's dozen of different families, with an amazing diversity between them. Both linguistically and historically, the journey is breath-taking - for me right now, and hopefully for the reader in 2017 or 2018.
Gaston Dorren Having been a singer-songwriter for a couple of years, with some of the repertoire falling in the comedy category, I felt like taking what I'd learnt there to what I'm probably best at: writing (without music) about what I find the most interesting field of all - linguistics. So I began to work on these fairly short articles about a couple of languages that I was more or less familiar with, like French and Danish. The more stories I wrote, the better I and some readers began to like them. So I set myself the challenge of dealing with most of Europe's languages in that same light-hearted but linguistically sound way.

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