Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler

I guess it’s been a while again. I apologize, but I was trying to slog my way through this Empires of the Word (Word, not World, mind you) book. Although “slog” has connotations of dissatisfaction with the reading process, and I was in no wise unhappy with my reading choice. I would often chose to knit over read, but I was never actually in want of giving up on this book.

Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler is a book about the history of languages–of written languages, specifically, since we cannot easily investigate the details of languages that were not written down, although some languages and their history can be reconstructed by the bits of themselves left behind in other languages. But basically this book focused on the written ones.

It was interesting. I think I wanted more anecdotal facts to share with others (where there were none), and I had a really hard time following the writing until after the bit about the ancient fertile crescent, which was a struggle both content-based, because I couldn’t recognize what was being spoken of, and language-based, since this author was writing as a British Academic Linguist, and I am an American…uh…dabbler. So I needed to adjust there. But once I did adjust, and could recognize the topics, it was very engrossing.

Especially in terms of ideas for world-building, since, let’s be honest, that’s why I read books like this. So I have a new shiny idea for the aether-verse world, and how language can suddenly be a major factor in …well, I don’t want to spoil anything, nor give anyone ideas about things that may never see the ink of day.

So the book was interesting, if slow, but I also felt like it was lacking in some places. Like it covered the spread of Russian, but I couldn’t remember anything about the origins of the Cyrillic alphabet. There might have been a bit about the origin of Russian the Language, and a few nods to standardizing the writing system, but nothing on the origins (and I would have remembered that bit, since I took some Russian in college). There was also a lack of consideration as to how recorded language might affect the changes of language over time. Which I suppose was just beyond the scope of this book (and perhaps it’s too new of a Thing to have been analyzed), but it was basically unmentioned, despite being a Big Deal if you think about it.

I think there were a few other points where I wanted a bit more detail, or felt that there were discussion holes, but I can’t remember them anymore, so let us no longer dwell upon them.

Overall I felt that this was a really good and informative read, and I feel like a more well-rounded person for having read it, even if it was slow and highly academic. And I’m really looking forward to reading as much fluff as I can fit on my kindle in the next few months.

Just after I read these four magazines that piled up while I was stuck in that book…