Are some languages worse than others? The question might sound silly, but in this entertaining exercise in “language tourism” (the book’s original Dutch title), the author isn’t frightened of making judgments. He thinks lenition – the habit in Welsh of “changing a word’s first letter for no apparent reason” – is just “mindboggling”, and generally that “Gaelic spelling is flawed … wasteful, arcane and outdated”. The “ludicrous” variety of cases in Slovak amounts to “chaos”, while Breton’s system of naming numbers makes mental arithmetic unnecessarily difficult.

In the author’s native Dutch, the gendering of nouns is changing in what he calls “a blatant act of linguistic sexism”. (Everything that is not obviously a female living thing is a “he”.) Nor will Anglophone readers of this edition feel smug after Dorren’s excellent dissection of the illogicality of English, with its 20 different vowel sounds, impossible spelling and idiosyncratic formations. (Very reasonably, Dorren wonders: “Why does English say ‘I want you to listen’ rather than the more straightforward ‘I want that you listen’?”)

Impressively, he has taken classes in many of the languages he writes about, as well as in sign language, about which he writes illuminatingly: “Are there no limits to what sign languages can do? There are a few, just as there are limitations to spoken languages (limited effectiveness in noisy environments, for instance).” His tour of the continent is a richly diverting exercise, organised into sections on languages and their families, history, politics, writing, vocabulary, grammar and state of endangeredness. He has something interesting to point out about nearly every topic (Maltese, for example, is the continent’s only Afro-Asiatic language; someone born in Azerbaijan in 1915 would have lived through four different official alphabets by 1995), and delivers a brilliant lesson in how to decipher Cyrillic. A pleasant lightbulb moment follows for the novice, when the Russian words for “passport”, “airport” and so forth become recognisable. The only unpersuasive entry, to my mind, was the one on French (which, admittedly, is the only other language I speak): here, he rather belabours the idea that French has an unhealthy mother fixation, because it stuck so closely to Latin during its development. Et alors?

The author’s complaints about bizarreries such as lenition are always delivered with a certain loving exasperation, but just as interesting are his explanations of ways in which other European languages besides English or Dutch can work better for some purposes. In Finnish and Hungarian, for example, he explains: “numerals are always followed by a singular (‘six dog’ rather than ‘six dogs’); if the number has been made explicit, why go to the extra trouble of modifying what follows?” Well, why indeed? Meanwhile, the Scandinavian and Slavic languages have a useful resource that English lacks: a reflexive possessive pronoun (to mean “his own” or “her own”).

Dorren likes to pat languages on the back when they demonstrate efficiency or the possibility for greater nuance of expression. But there is a tension between simplicity and usefulness. “A Bulgarian conjugation table,” he complains, “looks like a medical encyclopedia.” Among the possible verb forms is the renarrative (“what you use when the speaker is saying ‘I got this from hearsay’”), the inferential (“‘I’ve inferred this from other information’”), and the dubitative, to express scepticism. In another mood, Dorren might instead have celebrated Bulgarian for possessing such excellent resources to indicate epistemological states that other languages would need far more words to communicate.

One of this book’s simplest but most reliable pleasures, by contrast, is the suggestion of one or more words in each language for which English doesn’t have an equivalent, but might benefit from. Dutch, for example, has uitwaaien, which means to “relax by visiting a windy place, often chilly and rainy”. Dorren adds, characteristically: “Since the British, like the Dutch, display this peculiar behaviour, the word would be useful.” The Cornish word henting, which means “raining hard”, is, the author gently suggests, “useful for a Cornish holiday”. We might also want to adopt omenie (“a Romanian word for the virtue of being fully human, that is: gentle, decent, respectful, hospitable, honest, polite”), or, from Channel Island Norman, the evocative Ûssel’lie, which names “the continual opening and closing of doors”. The running joke is capped by the one language in which the author can find nothing enviable: “No Gagauz words have been borrowed by English and none that I’ve come upon seem especially desirable.”

What of the old dream of a pan-European language? Dorren explains, with a kind of fond amazement, the bizarre workings of Esperanto. It turned out to be not a best-of compilation of all the nicest parts of continental tongues; instead, with incomprehensible perversity, it decided to borrow some of the most difficult aspects of existing languages and mash them up into something that sounded alien and wrong to everybody. For a potential borrowing, he chooses sardonically: “Esperinto – somebody who used to be hopeful, but no longer is. A word that sums up neatly the mood of most Esperanto speakers.”

English, of course, is spoken by very many other Europeans as a second language, often better than the English speak it themselves. Its only rival in the global future, Dorren thinks, will be Mandarin Chinese. In an illuminating mini-essay, he points out that both languages are unusually difficult: English’s superfluity of vowels, Mandarin’s tones; English’s weird spelling, Mandarin’s character-based writing. Luckily, however, they both share a third quality, “paucity of inflection” – less of the “chaos” of noun cases and verb endings than many other languages. So which one ought to win out as the future’s lingua franca? That’s obvious to this learned and pleasantly ironic Dutchman. Mandarin – because then, finally, the people of Britain, like everyone else, would have to learn a second language.

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