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Vendor
C.H.BECK
Susanne Simor
Original language
German
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The strangest languages in the world

Harald Haarmann

Of click sounds and a hundred ways to say "I"

Many languages seem foreign to us because our usual grammatical patterns do not offer access to their click sounds or to their syntax. Harald Haarmann describes 49 languages with strange peculiarities in an entertaining and informative way. He astonishes his readers with a variety of human expressions and thus opens a window to just as many different ways of orientating ourselves in the world.

The book deals with unusual sound systems (such as ancient African click languages), strange grammars (the classification of all things in Thai), strange vocabulary (the language of the Japanese tea ceremony), strange counting systems (various twenties systems), languages changing according to social relations (the Khmer with its many ways of saying "I"), special sacral languages (for example to communicate with the ancestors), enigmatic scriptures such as Glagolitic, and constructed languages such as Esperanto and Klingon. Many of these languages seem strange from the perspective of the German language.The German language, with its unique nested sentences, is also attracting the attention of the internationally renowned language researcher.

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Book

Published by C.H.Beck

Main content page count: 208 Pages