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How Dead Languages Work
What could Greek poets or Roman historians say in their own language that would be lost in translation? After all, different languages have different personalities, and this is especially clear with languages of the ancient and medieval world. This volume celebrates six such languages - Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Biblical Hebrew - by first introducing readers to their most distinctive features, then showing how these linguistic traits play out in short excerpts from actual ancient texts.
It explores, for instance, how Homer's Greek shows signs of oral composition, how Horace achieves striking poetic effects through interlaced word order in his Latin, and how the poet of Beowulf attains remarkable intensity of expression through the resources of Old English. But these are languages that have shared connections as well. Readers will see how the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda uses words that come from roots found also in English, how turns of phrase characteristic of the Hebrew Bible found their way into English, and that even as unusual a language as Old Irish still builds on common Indo-European linguistic patterns.
Very few people have the opportunity to learn these languages, and they can often seem mysterious and inaccessible: drawing on a lucid and engaging writing style and with the aid of clear English translations throughout, this book aims to give all readers, whether scholars, students, or interested novices, an aesthetic appreciation of just how rich and varied they are.
It explores, for instance, how Homer's Greek shows signs of oral composition, how Horace achieves striking poetic effects through interlaced word order in his Latin, and how the poet of Beowulf attains remarkable intensity of expression through the resources of Old English. But these are languages that have shared connections as well. Readers will see how the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda uses words that come from roots found also in English, how turns of phrase characteristic of the Hebrew Bible found their way into English, and that even as unusual a language as Old Irish still builds on common Indo-European linguistic patterns.
Very few people have the opportunity to learn these languages, and they can often seem mysterious and inaccessible: drawing on a lucid and engaging writing style and with the aid of clear English translations throughout, this book aims to give all readers, whether scholars, students, or interested novices, an aesthetic appreciation of just how rich and varied they are.
234 pages, Hardcover
Published June 20, 2020
108 people are currently reading
870 people want to read
About the author
Coulter H. George
4 books5 followersCoulter H. George is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. The author of Expressions of Agency in Ancient Greek (CUP, 2005) and Expressions of Time in Ancient Greek (CUP, 2014), he has also taught at Rice University and was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
December 30, 2022
Review Soporific. English has 7, but Greek has 283 ways of declining a verb. I only did Greek when in detention so I never got that far.
__________
Reading notes Actually I was only in detention once. But I had to do it over three days. My sin was I had slopped a pink rabbit blancmange over Adele Nelson's (oooh I even remember her name) foot. She was the beautiful head girl and I was years younger. She had told me off for not wearing my hat in town - if you were in uniform you had to wear the stupid hat. She accused me of deliberately slopping the blancmange over her foot. I hadn't actually but I smirked.
So the first day I had to write an essay on representing the school, and the importance of uniform. I wrote it in assorted colours of wax crayons.
The second day I had to translate a passage from French into English. Having been told off for the wax crayons, 'Please Miss Nelson, I didn't have a pen that worked with me,' I had been warned to bring a pen. So I did the girly thing, little circles for dots over i's, curly letters, all that rubbish.
On the third day, I had Greek. I have totally blanked from my mind what I had to do. But Miss Nelson told me that I was excused. I don't think she could take any more of me!
__________
Reading notes Actually I was only in detention once. But I had to do it over three days. My sin was I had slopped a pink rabbit blancmange over Adele Nelson's (oooh I even remember her name) foot. She was the beautiful head girl and I was years younger. She had told me off for not wearing my hat in town - if you were in uniform you had to wear the stupid hat. She accused me of deliberately slopping the blancmange over her foot. I hadn't actually but I smirked.
So the first day I had to write an essay on representing the school, and the importance of uniform. I wrote it in assorted colours of wax crayons.
The second day I had to translate a passage from French into English. Having been told off for the wax crayons, 'Please Miss Nelson, I didn't have a pen that worked with me,' I had been warned to bring a pen. So I did the girly thing, little circles for dots over i's, curly letters, all that rubbish.
On the third day, I had Greek. I have totally blanked from my mind what I had to do. But Miss Nelson told me that I was excused. I don't think she could take any more of me!
October 9, 2025
This book is a delightful feast for readers interested in languages, their history and constant evolvement. I first noticed it as a recently published audiobook on audible.com. Not only languages but dead languages -- of course, I grabbed it. When I finally started listening to it, the preface with general musings about the reason and purpose of the book worked pretty well on audio, but when it got to the gritty language stuff, and I sensed the author could be actually quoting Greek words and even sentences spelled in Greek, I just had to grab the Kindle ebook as well. So I switched to the ebook and made some 87 (!) highlights along the way.
So did I find the book interesting? You bet. Honestly, I don't know how this book, with all its delightful multi-language quotes from ancient texts, could work on audio without losing much of its content and enjoyment. I can imagine relistening to it on audio though, or listening to it while having the text in front of your eyes.
Chapter by chapter, "How Dead Languages Work" takes you on a journey through Greek, Latin, Old English and Germanic languages, Sanskrit, Old Irish and the Celtic languages (Welsh, among others) and Hebrew. As you travel through this amazing linguistic universe, you learn a lot about how languages work, how they evolve, how each language has its own peculiarities and its own way of expressing meaning, and how some of this meaning is inevitably lost or transformed in the process of translation to another language.
The tone of the book is neither of an academic article impenetrable for the general public nor of your average dumbed-down oversimplified popular science bestseller. I would call it academic-lite -- on the one hand, serious and rigorous, with lots of footnotes about sources and intricacies, and on the other never boring, filled with dry humor and easily readable for a non-specialist interested in the topic. Even the "dreaded footnotes" are often a delight to read.
I will not torture you here with my 87 highlights -- anyway, you wouldn't stay to suffer this abuse. But I can't resist attaching a quote or few for each chapter.
Preface:
It’s all very well to say that Latin poetry can do different things from English poetry because of the more flexible word order, but if you don’t know Latin, then it’s hard to get much of a feeling for what that means—unless someone takes you through some actual lines of Horace. Accordingly, the book works in turn through six ancient languages or language groups that are especially important to the West, and which illustrate the wide range of personalities that different languages can have. Throughout, the fundamental aim is to show readers just how much they miss when they read the great works of ancient literature in translation—no matter how good the translation—rather than in the original.
The chapter on Greek provides interesting insights into the peculiarities of English spelling, among other things:
Why spell with ph, ch, and rh sounds that could be adequately represented with f, k (or c), and r? The Spanish, after all, manage just fine with cronología, retórica, and física. Also, why use an h, anyway? It makes sense in a word like uphill, where there really is a p followed by an h, but not in photo, where there’s only a single f sound at the beginning. Again, the explanation lies in the change of pronunciation over time. Leaving aside rh, which is a different matter,5 take the digraphs (two-letter combinations) ph, ch, and th. When used for words of Greek origin, these represent the single letters phi (ϕ), chi (χ), and theta (θ). In Modern Greek, these are pronounced respectively f, ch-as-in-Bach, and th-as-in-theta—what linguists call fricatives, in which the airflow through the mouth isn’t completely blocked off but merely restricted. Not so, however, in Ancient Greek, when they were aspirated stops—that is, a p, k, or t (all examples of stops, that is, sounds where the airflow is completely blocked) each followed by an h sound (that is, aspiration). In other words, the th in a word like Ancient Greek anthos (“flower”) would not have been pronounced as it is in our word anthology but as in ant-hill. In late antiquity, the earlier pronunciation of these sounds as p+h, k+h, t+h would eventually weaken to the fricative pronunciation they have today—but not before Latin, which itself borrowed a lot of words from Greek, had standardized the practice of spelling them ph, ch, and th like the aspirated stops they were. But even when the pronunciation changed, the spelling with the h remained.
Most readers of this book will probably be sympathetic to the idea that poetry, in particular, loses a great deal in translation. But what about prose? It’s a more pedestrian form of language—literally, in fact, in Greek, where the adjective pezos can mean either “on foot” or “in prose”
Latin:
in purely written documents, there was potentially scope for confusion, and the identical spelling of malum “bad” and malum “apple” is what led the fruit that Eve gave to Adam to be identified in the Middle Ages as the apple. (It had been left unspecified in Hebrew.)
Old English and the Germanic languages:
the whole process whereby a word gradually goes from being a full word with its own semantic force (“I have a car”), to an auxiliary word used to mark a grammatical feature, like tense (“I have walked”), to an unstressed unit that no longer counts as a full word, but, as a so-called enclitic, leans on another (“I’ve walked”), to a ending that’s become fused with its host word (“aimerai”) is what linguists call grammaticalization.
Essentially, a past tense like I walked is the end result of the weakening of a structure comparable to I walk-did. That a fuller verb form ultimately underlies the -ed suffix can be seen most clearly in the oldest Germanic language to be attested in any sizable corpus, Gothic. The weak verb hausjan “to hear” has the following past-tense conjugation: While the exact origin of this paradigm is beyond the scope of this book, the plural endings, with their d-vowel-d structure, are excellent evidence that the past tense of these Germanic verbs was originally an early form of did
The Germanic languages developed new words for “dawn”—dawn itself is related to day—but the old word survived in a somewhat shifted semantic domain. Dawn breaks pretty regularly in one particular part of the sky, and the Germanic languages preserved the derivative *austa- as the designation of the east. (Germanic au most often becomes ea in Modern English: this is not the most transparent of sound changes, but it does account for equations like German Baum “tree” = English beam, and Laub “foliage” = leaf.) Furthermore, when Germanic speakers were searching for the best term to designate the central holiday of Christianity, the day of the Resurrection, rather than simply borrowing the Hebrew word for Passover, pesaḥ, which passed into Greek and Latin as Pascha (whence Spanish Pascua and French Pâques), they turned instead to the old root that referred to the dawn—because, if we are to trust Bede (De temporum ratione ), the festival of a pagan goddess of the dawn was held at about the same time. And so we now celebrate Easter.
Sanskrit:
The more that was known about Sanskrit in the West, the more it became clear that any account of the origins of Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages had to take into consideration the similarities they shared with Sanskrit, the language of such important Hindu texts as the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. This awareness was stated most famously by Sir William Jones, in a speech delivered before the Asiatick Society of Calcutta on February 2, 1786, a date now generally given as the birthday of Indo-European linguistics.
As it happens, l and r are similar sounds to begin with, and many of the world’s languages have only one or the other. Japanese, for instance, has only r, so when foreign words with l are borrowed into Japanese, the l’s all turn into r’s: thus, the English words salary man become Japanese sarariman. So too in Sanskrit, inherited l’s generally became r’s, leading not only to puru but also to the following equation: English light (i.e. the opposite of darkness), Latin lūc- “light”, Greek leukos “white”, but Sanskrit ruc- “to shine”.
Old Irish and Celtic languages:
Old Irish, the form of Irish spoken from roughly the seventh through ninth centuries ad, is arguably the most difficult of the Indo-European languages, almost willfully so.
We’ll limit ourselves here to a couple of sentences from the most important of them, the Táin Bó Cúailnge (“Cattle Raid of Cooley”). The Táin belongs to what is known as the Ulster Cycle, an important set of tales featuring the king of Ulster, Conchobor, and his chief warrior Cú Chulainn. In the Táin, the rival king of Connacht, Ailill, and his rather more impressive queen Medb,16 mount a raid to seize a particularly fine bull that’s kept in Ulster, but their aims are repeatedly thwarted through the actions of Cú Chulainn, who acts as a sort of Irish Achilles. What makes Cú Chulainn different from Achilles—and, with it, the Táin from the Iliad—is a much more outlandish degree of fantasy in the description of his prowess in battle. He is particularly associated with the ríastrad, variously translated as “warp-spasm” or “torque”. Here are just a few of its more picturesque effects: The first warp-spasm seized [Cú Chulainn], and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front … His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek … [I]f a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.
We next turn to Welsh, today the most widely spoken of the Celtic languages. This sometimes comes as a surprise: given the size (and boisterous pride) of the Irish diaspora, not to mention the fact that the Republic of Ireland is an independent country, Irish would at first glance seem to have had a better chance of holding its own against English. But only about 100,000 people, less than 2% of the population, live in the Gaeltacht, the part of Ireland where Irish is still spoken regularly outside the classroom, whereas about 562,000 people in Wales can speak Welsh—nearly 20% of the population.
Hebrew:
One final word in this passage worth looking at is ’ôr, the word for “light”. While there aren’t a lot of direct English derivatives of the words we come across in this chapter—we’ve left Indo-European behind, after all—there’s probably a connection between this word and ancient objects referred to in English by their Hebrew name: the Urim and Thummim. To judge from passages like Exodus 28:30 and 1 Samuel 14:41, these were, it seems, some sort of item placed in the breastpiece of the high priest that were used in the determination of judgments by the casting of lots—essentially, the Magic 8 Ball of the ancient Israelites. Whatever the exact physical make-up of these objects (and, for that matter, whatever the actual etymology of the phrase, which remains disputed), the first word, ’ûrîm, was taken to be yet another intensive plural, in this case to a word ’ûr, understood to be from the same triconsonantal root, ’‑w-r, as ’ôr, the word for “light”.11 And the second word, tummîm, was regarded as a derivative of the root t-m-m “to be complete, have integrity”. Accordingly, in the Latin Vulgate of Exodus 28:30, they’re translated as doctrīna “teaching” (viewed as a type of illumination) and vēritās “truth”, following the Greek Septuagint fairly closely, which offers dēlōsis “clarification” and alētheia “truth”. Somewhat less expected, the phrase also makes an appearance as the motto of Yale University, which both depicts the Hebrew letters (’ûrîm wə-tummîm) across the pages of an open book and the Latin translation Lūx et vēritās (“Light and truth”) below—a gloss on the Hebrew that, while an excellent guiding principle for a university, doesn’t do justice to the semantic complexities of the original phrase.
Epilogue:
Languages are embedded in the societies that speak them, and the narrative thread can be woven more tightly if the connections drawn between the sample texts include not only specific points of grammar but also shared motifs, like the dragon-slaying myth, and the broader influence one language can exert on another, with Lucretius extending what Latin can do as he proselytizes for Greek ideas, or the translators of the King James Version (KJV) repeating the phrase It came to pass in order to reflect Hebrew syntax.
The last sentence is worthy of a true language study enthusiast:
What emerges from all of these works is the sheer wealth of material dead languages give us to explore—more than one can possibly get to in a lifetime. And whether you end up chasing down any of these leads or not, I hope you’ll excuse me now: there’s some Greek I’d like to go read. Or maybe it’s time for some Latin. Or Hebrew. You get the picture.
I'm very glad I stumbled upon "How Dead Languages Work". Now Kindle keeps suggesting I should read "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian". I can't deny I'm tempted by this daunting enterprise.
Read in 2022.
So did I find the book interesting? You bet. Honestly, I don't know how this book, with all its delightful multi-language quotes from ancient texts, could work on audio without losing much of its content and enjoyment. I can imagine relistening to it on audio though, or listening to it while having the text in front of your eyes.
Chapter by chapter, "How Dead Languages Work" takes you on a journey through Greek, Latin, Old English and Germanic languages, Sanskrit, Old Irish and the Celtic languages (Welsh, among others) and Hebrew. As you travel through this amazing linguistic universe, you learn a lot about how languages work, how they evolve, how each language has its own peculiarities and its own way of expressing meaning, and how some of this meaning is inevitably lost or transformed in the process of translation to another language.
The tone of the book is neither of an academic article impenetrable for the general public nor of your average dumbed-down oversimplified popular science bestseller. I would call it academic-lite -- on the one hand, serious and rigorous, with lots of footnotes about sources and intricacies, and on the other never boring, filled with dry humor and easily readable for a non-specialist interested in the topic. Even the "dreaded footnotes" are often a delight to read.
I will not torture you here with my 87 highlights -- anyway, you wouldn't stay to suffer this abuse. But I can't resist attaching a quote or few for each chapter.
Preface:
It’s all very well to say that Latin poetry can do different things from English poetry because of the more flexible word order, but if you don’t know Latin, then it’s hard to get much of a feeling for what that means—unless someone takes you through some actual lines of Horace. Accordingly, the book works in turn through six ancient languages or language groups that are especially important to the West, and which illustrate the wide range of personalities that different languages can have. Throughout, the fundamental aim is to show readers just how much they miss when they read the great works of ancient literature in translation—no matter how good the translation—rather than in the original.
The chapter on Greek provides interesting insights into the peculiarities of English spelling, among other things:
Why spell with ph, ch, and rh sounds that could be adequately represented with f, k (or c), and r? The Spanish, after all, manage just fine with cronología, retórica, and física. Also, why use an h, anyway? It makes sense in a word like uphill, where there really is a p followed by an h, but not in photo, where there’s only a single f sound at the beginning. Again, the explanation lies in the change of pronunciation over time. Leaving aside rh, which is a different matter,5 take the digraphs (two-letter combinations) ph, ch, and th. When used for words of Greek origin, these represent the single letters phi (ϕ), chi (χ), and theta (θ). In Modern Greek, these are pronounced respectively f, ch-as-in-Bach, and th-as-in-theta—what linguists call fricatives, in which the airflow through the mouth isn’t completely blocked off but merely restricted. Not so, however, in Ancient Greek, when they were aspirated stops—that is, a p, k, or t (all examples of stops, that is, sounds where the airflow is completely blocked) each followed by an h sound (that is, aspiration). In other words, the th in a word like Ancient Greek anthos (“flower”) would not have been pronounced as it is in our word anthology but as in ant-hill. In late antiquity, the earlier pronunciation of these sounds as p+h, k+h, t+h would eventually weaken to the fricative pronunciation they have today—but not before Latin, which itself borrowed a lot of words from Greek, had standardized the practice of spelling them ph, ch, and th like the aspirated stops they were. But even when the pronunciation changed, the spelling with the h remained.
Most readers of this book will probably be sympathetic to the idea that poetry, in particular, loses a great deal in translation. But what about prose? It’s a more pedestrian form of language—literally, in fact, in Greek, where the adjective pezos can mean either “on foot” or “in prose”
Latin:
in purely written documents, there was potentially scope for confusion, and the identical spelling of malum “bad” and malum “apple” is what led the fruit that Eve gave to Adam to be identified in the Middle Ages as the apple. (It had been left unspecified in Hebrew.)
Old English and the Germanic languages:
the whole process whereby a word gradually goes from being a full word with its own semantic force (“I have a car”), to an auxiliary word used to mark a grammatical feature, like tense (“I have walked”), to an unstressed unit that no longer counts as a full word, but, as a so-called enclitic, leans on another (“I’ve walked”), to a ending that’s become fused with its host word (“aimerai”) is what linguists call grammaticalization.
Essentially, a past tense like I walked is the end result of the weakening of a structure comparable to I walk-did. That a fuller verb form ultimately underlies the -ed suffix can be seen most clearly in the oldest Germanic language to be attested in any sizable corpus, Gothic. The weak verb hausjan “to hear” has the following past-tense conjugation: While the exact origin of this paradigm is beyond the scope of this book, the plural endings, with their d-vowel-d structure, are excellent evidence that the past tense of these Germanic verbs was originally an early form of did
The Germanic languages developed new words for “dawn”—dawn itself is related to day—but the old word survived in a somewhat shifted semantic domain. Dawn breaks pretty regularly in one particular part of the sky, and the Germanic languages preserved the derivative *austa- as the designation of the east. (Germanic au most often becomes ea in Modern English: this is not the most transparent of sound changes, but it does account for equations like German Baum “tree” = English beam, and Laub “foliage” = leaf.) Furthermore, when Germanic speakers were searching for the best term to designate the central holiday of Christianity, the day of the Resurrection, rather than simply borrowing the Hebrew word for Passover, pesaḥ, which passed into Greek and Latin as Pascha (whence Spanish Pascua and French Pâques), they turned instead to the old root that referred to the dawn—because, if we are to trust Bede (De temporum ratione ), the festival of a pagan goddess of the dawn was held at about the same time. And so we now celebrate Easter.
Sanskrit:
The more that was known about Sanskrit in the West, the more it became clear that any account of the origins of Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages had to take into consideration the similarities they shared with Sanskrit, the language of such important Hindu texts as the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. This awareness was stated most famously by Sir William Jones, in a speech delivered before the Asiatick Society of Calcutta on February 2, 1786, a date now generally given as the birthday of Indo-European linguistics.
As it happens, l and r are similar sounds to begin with, and many of the world’s languages have only one or the other. Japanese, for instance, has only r, so when foreign words with l are borrowed into Japanese, the l’s all turn into r’s: thus, the English words salary man become Japanese sarariman. So too in Sanskrit, inherited l’s generally became r’s, leading not only to puru but also to the following equation: English light (i.e. the opposite of darkness), Latin lūc- “light”, Greek leukos “white”, but Sanskrit ruc- “to shine”.
Old Irish and Celtic languages:
Old Irish, the form of Irish spoken from roughly the seventh through ninth centuries ad, is arguably the most difficult of the Indo-European languages, almost willfully so.
We’ll limit ourselves here to a couple of sentences from the most important of them, the Táin Bó Cúailnge (“Cattle Raid of Cooley”). The Táin belongs to what is known as the Ulster Cycle, an important set of tales featuring the king of Ulster, Conchobor, and his chief warrior Cú Chulainn. In the Táin, the rival king of Connacht, Ailill, and his rather more impressive queen Medb,16 mount a raid to seize a particularly fine bull that’s kept in Ulster, but their aims are repeatedly thwarted through the actions of Cú Chulainn, who acts as a sort of Irish Achilles. What makes Cú Chulainn different from Achilles—and, with it, the Táin from the Iliad—is a much more outlandish degree of fantasy in the description of his prowess in battle. He is particularly associated with the ríastrad, variously translated as “warp-spasm” or “torque”. Here are just a few of its more picturesque effects: The first warp-spasm seized [Cú Chulainn], and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front … His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek … [I]f a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.
We next turn to Welsh, today the most widely spoken of the Celtic languages. This sometimes comes as a surprise: given the size (and boisterous pride) of the Irish diaspora, not to mention the fact that the Republic of Ireland is an independent country, Irish would at first glance seem to have had a better chance of holding its own against English. But only about 100,000 people, less than 2% of the population, live in the Gaeltacht, the part of Ireland where Irish is still spoken regularly outside the classroom, whereas about 562,000 people in Wales can speak Welsh—nearly 20% of the population.
Hebrew:
One final word in this passage worth looking at is ’ôr, the word for “light”. While there aren’t a lot of direct English derivatives of the words we come across in this chapter—we’ve left Indo-European behind, after all—there’s probably a connection between this word and ancient objects referred to in English by their Hebrew name: the Urim and Thummim. To judge from passages like Exodus 28:30 and 1 Samuel 14:41, these were, it seems, some sort of item placed in the breastpiece of the high priest that were used in the determination of judgments by the casting of lots—essentially, the Magic 8 Ball of the ancient Israelites. Whatever the exact physical make-up of these objects (and, for that matter, whatever the actual etymology of the phrase, which remains disputed), the first word, ’ûrîm, was taken to be yet another intensive plural, in this case to a word ’ûr, understood to be from the same triconsonantal root, ’‑w-r, as ’ôr, the word for “light”.11 And the second word, tummîm, was regarded as a derivative of the root t-m-m “to be complete, have integrity”. Accordingly, in the Latin Vulgate of Exodus 28:30, they’re translated as doctrīna “teaching” (viewed as a type of illumination) and vēritās “truth”, following the Greek Septuagint fairly closely, which offers dēlōsis “clarification” and alētheia “truth”. Somewhat less expected, the phrase also makes an appearance as the motto of Yale University, which both depicts the Hebrew letters (’ûrîm wə-tummîm) across the pages of an open book and the Latin translation Lūx et vēritās (“Light and truth”) below—a gloss on the Hebrew that, while an excellent guiding principle for a university, doesn’t do justice to the semantic complexities of the original phrase.
Epilogue:
Languages are embedded in the societies that speak them, and the narrative thread can be woven more tightly if the connections drawn between the sample texts include not only specific points of grammar but also shared motifs, like the dragon-slaying myth, and the broader influence one language can exert on another, with Lucretius extending what Latin can do as he proselytizes for Greek ideas, or the translators of the King James Version (KJV) repeating the phrase It came to pass in order to reflect Hebrew syntax.
The last sentence is worthy of a true language study enthusiast:
What emerges from all of these works is the sheer wealth of material dead languages give us to explore—more than one can possibly get to in a lifetime. And whether you end up chasing down any of these leads or not, I hope you’ll excuse me now: there’s some Greek I’d like to go read. Or maybe it’s time for some Latin. Or Hebrew. You get the picture.
I'm very glad I stumbled upon "How Dead Languages Work". Now Kindle keeps suggesting I should read "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian". I can't deny I'm tempted by this daunting enterprise.
Read in 2022.
February 27, 2022
Quite an insightful book, for sure; I think non-linguists would have a difficult time grasping all the information that the author provides (it's difficult even for people who have already dipped their toes into language learning). Listening to the audiobook is definitely not the best way to absorb the knowledge the book contains, not least of all because of the abysmal pronunciation of the narrator - I know Greek, and I couldn't make heads or tails of what he was saying during the part devoted to Ancient Greek (ok, nobody can really criticize the pronunciation of a dead language, but still, I feel that I should have given a chance to the printed version instead). And obviously, one cannot but agree with the author - the best way to understand how dead languages work is to "simply" learn them.
April 12, 2024
240412 How Dead Languages Work by Coulter H. George
This is a Cook’s tour of six ancient languages – Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Hebrew. Five the of the languages are Indo-European. The odd man out is Hebrew.
The author, Coulter H. George, knows and loves language. You can tell this from his allusions, witty asides, and nerdish intensity on case and declension. His approach is to examine the phonology of the language – how the language sounds – followed by the grammar of the language – how thoughts are put into words – and, then, these ideas are put into practice by reading a great work in the language, such as Homer in Greek and Tacitus in Latin. From this, even those of us who are not gifted with language skills obtain a sense of what it would be like to read these texts in their original languages. George brings out the uniqueness of each language, such as the brevity of Latin, where so much is done by the declension of words through case endings. Similarly, he explains the craziness of Old Irish spelling where letters are inserted to indicate that a sound is palatized or mutated. For example, my middle name is “Sean” pronounced “Shawn” not “Scene.” In “Sean” the “e” after the “S” communicates the “Sh” sound.
Well why not? How does an “h” after an “S” make the “Sh” sound?
Convention.
But Irish and Welsh extrapolate this approach to a degree that speakers of Sassenach Anglo-Saxon find impossible to pronounce, such as the memorable “Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu,”
And there is a funny story about that phrase, which George shares as follows:
in 2008, an official road sign appeared in Swansea with the English “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only” translated into Welsh as Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu, which actually means “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work for translation.” Now a more rigorous proofreading system should no doubt be in place to prevent such slips, but, for our purposes, it’s worth pointing out that there’s not a single word in the Welsh sentences above that resembles anything in either the actual or the faulty English translations, with the possible exception of nid, which looks like it could be a negative word (and negatives are indeed there in both English versions).
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 178). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
I am the opposite of gifted with language, but I love etymology. I was fascinated to find new etymological roots. Geroge offers intelligible discussions of phonological changes in Indo-European.
The discussion of grammar in the various languages also helps to explain the quirks of English. I am so much closer to understanding the mysteries of “lie/lay”:
In short, what’s happening here is that the vowel changes caused by umlaut are not being applied to the present-tense stem but to something resembling the past-tense stem: set may not look like an umlauted form compared to sit, but it does when compared to sat. And the same is ultimately true of lay as well. Transitive lay (of to lay the book on the table) goes back to the umlauted form of the intransitive past lay (that is, the lay of the book just lay there on the table):
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 107). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
Well, it’s complicated.
Here is George’s gloss on the John 3:16:
Take, for instance, the version of John 3:16 found in the tenth-century Wessex Gospels:29 God lufode middaneard, swā þæt hē sealde his āncennedan Sunu, þæt nān ne forweorðe þe on hine ġelyfð, ac hæbbe þæt ēċe līf.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (KJV, 1611)
Consider for now just the first ten words in Old English. All but one of them, āncennedan, has a fairly clear Modern English descendant, and we could rewrite it as follows:
God loved mid-yard, so that he sold his ‘one-kind’ Son
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 117). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
“Mid-yard”? Sold?
George explains “mid-yard” as follows:
“Middaneard is a compound of middan and eard. The first half is comparable to the modern prefix mid-, but it is less clear what exactly eard represents, since this second element was subject to variation within Old English between eard and ġeard. The latter variant, with the word that gave rise to Modern English yard (showing the same change of ġ to y seen above, with the pronoun ġē becoming ye), shows especially well the close cultural relationship between Old English and its sister language Old Norse. In Norse mythology, the world as inhabited by ordinary people was known as Miðgarðr, generally anglicized to Midgard.31 It was called this because it was enclosed (a yard is, ultimately, an enclosure) in the middle of various other worlds that were not accessible to ordinary mortals. But, as a term referring to the world of men, the second element of Old English middanġeard was later on reinterpreted as earth, giving rise to the term Middle Earth, popularized by J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a scholar of the early Germanic languages. In either case, the Old English version of John 3:16 comes across as decidedly more Germanic once one recognizes that the word for “world” is virtually the same as a key place name in one or the other of these two mythologies, the Vikings’ and Tolkien’s.
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 118). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
So, Mid-yard leads to Midgard and to Middle Earth and the thing you mow during the summer.
Concerning “sold”:
Drop the final -e, and sealde is only a vowel away from its modern counterpart sold, but there’s also been an important change in sense, too: Old English sellan meant simply to give something away, whereas Modern English sell entails the receipt of money in exchange.
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 118). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
This is fascinating stuff…if you like this kind of thing.
For a lot of people, the references to cases and grammar and to the positioning of tongue to pronounce sounds will be a deal killer. I listened to this book as an audiobook and I found the book sufficiently interesting in terms of “gosh-wow! That’s why we do that” insights to keep me going. It also gave me a sense of how other languages work, which was interesting. But if you are not interested in things linguistic, this will probably not be your cup of tea.
This is a Cook’s tour of six ancient languages – Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Hebrew. Five the of the languages are Indo-European. The odd man out is Hebrew.
The author, Coulter H. George, knows and loves language. You can tell this from his allusions, witty asides, and nerdish intensity on case and declension. His approach is to examine the phonology of the language – how the language sounds – followed by the grammar of the language – how thoughts are put into words – and, then, these ideas are put into practice by reading a great work in the language, such as Homer in Greek and Tacitus in Latin. From this, even those of us who are not gifted with language skills obtain a sense of what it would be like to read these texts in their original languages. George brings out the uniqueness of each language, such as the brevity of Latin, where so much is done by the declension of words through case endings. Similarly, he explains the craziness of Old Irish spelling where letters are inserted to indicate that a sound is palatized or mutated. For example, my middle name is “Sean” pronounced “Shawn” not “Scene.” In “Sean” the “e” after the “S” communicates the “Sh” sound.
Well why not? How does an “h” after an “S” make the “Sh” sound?
Convention.
But Irish and Welsh extrapolate this approach to a degree that speakers of Sassenach Anglo-Saxon find impossible to pronounce, such as the memorable “Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu,”
And there is a funny story about that phrase, which George shares as follows:
in 2008, an official road sign appeared in Swansea with the English “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only” translated into Welsh as Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu, which actually means “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work for translation.” Now a more rigorous proofreading system should no doubt be in place to prevent such slips, but, for our purposes, it’s worth pointing out that there’s not a single word in the Welsh sentences above that resembles anything in either the actual or the faulty English translations, with the possible exception of nid, which looks like it could be a negative word (and negatives are indeed there in both English versions).
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 178). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
I am the opposite of gifted with language, but I love etymology. I was fascinated to find new etymological roots. Geroge offers intelligible discussions of phonological changes in Indo-European.
The discussion of grammar in the various languages also helps to explain the quirks of English. I am so much closer to understanding the mysteries of “lie/lay”:
In short, what’s happening here is that the vowel changes caused by umlaut are not being applied to the present-tense stem but to something resembling the past-tense stem: set may not look like an umlauted form compared to sit, but it does when compared to sat. And the same is ultimately true of lay as well. Transitive lay (of to lay the book on the table) goes back to the umlauted form of the intransitive past lay (that is, the lay of the book just lay there on the table):
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 107). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
Well, it’s complicated.
Here is George’s gloss on the John 3:16:
Take, for instance, the version of John 3:16 found in the tenth-century Wessex Gospels:29 God lufode middaneard, swā þæt hē sealde his āncennedan Sunu, þæt nān ne forweorðe þe on hine ġelyfð, ac hæbbe þæt ēċe līf.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (KJV, 1611)
Consider for now just the first ten words in Old English. All but one of them, āncennedan, has a fairly clear Modern English descendant, and we could rewrite it as follows:
God loved mid-yard, so that he sold his ‘one-kind’ Son
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 117). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
“Mid-yard”? Sold?
George explains “mid-yard” as follows:
“Middaneard is a compound of middan and eard. The first half is comparable to the modern prefix mid-, but it is less clear what exactly eard represents, since this second element was subject to variation within Old English between eard and ġeard. The latter variant, with the word that gave rise to Modern English yard (showing the same change of ġ to y seen above, with the pronoun ġē becoming ye), shows especially well the close cultural relationship between Old English and its sister language Old Norse. In Norse mythology, the world as inhabited by ordinary people was known as Miðgarðr, generally anglicized to Midgard.31 It was called this because it was enclosed (a yard is, ultimately, an enclosure) in the middle of various other worlds that were not accessible to ordinary mortals. But, as a term referring to the world of men, the second element of Old English middanġeard was later on reinterpreted as earth, giving rise to the term Middle Earth, popularized by J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a scholar of the early Germanic languages. In either case, the Old English version of John 3:16 comes across as decidedly more Germanic once one recognizes that the word for “world” is virtually the same as a key place name in one or the other of these two mythologies, the Vikings’ and Tolkien’s.
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 118). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
So, Mid-yard leads to Midgard and to Middle Earth and the thing you mow during the summer.
Concerning “sold”:
Drop the final -e, and sealde is only a vowel away from its modern counterpart sold, but there’s also been an important change in sense, too: Old English sellan meant simply to give something away, whereas Modern English sell entails the receipt of money in exchange.
George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 118). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
This is fascinating stuff…if you like this kind of thing.
For a lot of people, the references to cases and grammar and to the positioning of tongue to pronounce sounds will be a deal killer. I listened to this book as an audiobook and I found the book sufficiently interesting in terms of “gosh-wow! That’s why we do that” insights to keep me going. It also gave me a sense of how other languages work, which was interesting. But if you are not interested in things linguistic, this will probably not be your cup of tea.
February 24, 2025
13 hours on Audible. I loved learning about the intricacies and function of ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Old English, Old Welsh, and Old Irish.
June 25, 2020
An exploration of how latin, Ancient Greek, old English & German (a lot more closely related than many people think), Sanskrit, old Irish, welsh, and Hebrew work. The grammar. Sentence construction. How they differ from English. Word endings and conjugations. And most of all- the challenges that are presented when translating texts from older languages into modern English. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than I realized. I thought it was more straightforward like “latin word XYZ = English word ABC” but the rabbit hole goes deep.
This book was deeply fascinating. I’ve always been interested in etymology and words and languages in general and this book was absolutely satisfying on all counts.
This book was deeply fascinating. I’ve always been interested in etymology and words and languages in general and this book was absolutely satisfying on all counts.
February 6, 2023
This book is a walkthrough of six dead languages - Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish (and some Middle Welsh), and Biblical Hebrew. It walks you through some of the main features of the language, and then breaks down some real extracts of ancient texts to help you understand how the language goes together (requiring no existing knowledge of the languages).
The book did include a lot of snippets of interest. For example, the fact that an Ancient Greek verb could have up to 283 conjugations. Or the fact that although Irish and Welsh can look completely unrelated to other European languages, once you know about the key sound changes that took place as different European languages diverged, it’s possible to find lots of cognates between languages which seem as obscure to each other as Welsh and Greek. Or the fact that the Bible sometimes reads so strangely in English because of attempts to translate constructions in Hebrew, Greek or Latin that have no direct equivalents in English.
I did feel that it went a little too in-depth sometimes; even though I have a good grasp of grammar such as cases, sometimes the level of detail felt it had wandered away from the accessible brief. But the author clearly has an incredible amount of knowledge about the subject and communicates it passionately.
The book did include a lot of snippets of interest. For example, the fact that an Ancient Greek verb could have up to 283 conjugations. Or the fact that although Irish and Welsh can look completely unrelated to other European languages, once you know about the key sound changes that took place as different European languages diverged, it’s possible to find lots of cognates between languages which seem as obscure to each other as Welsh and Greek. Or the fact that the Bible sometimes reads so strangely in English because of attempts to translate constructions in Hebrew, Greek or Latin that have no direct equivalents in English.
I did feel that it went a little too in-depth sometimes; even though I have a good grasp of grammar such as cases, sometimes the level of detail felt it had wandered away from the accessible brief. But the author clearly has an incredible amount of knowledge about the subject and communicates it passionately.
April 5, 2024
A five-star idea and a no-star book, as far as I'm concerned. What monolinguist wouldn't want to understand what it's like to read ancient classics in the original? Hell, the translations of French that I see make that language seem gassy and pretentious, yet French people persist in using it for what must seem to them like good reasons.
But I was felled, two-thirds of the way through chapter one (on Greek), by the jargon of grammarians, who rival literary theorists for "explanations" designed to stamp out any interest the public might show in their fields. The vocabulary of tenses and cases was clearly invented as a way of tormenting children in British public schools, and it makes the words on the page turn to cuneiform. Unless a writer arises who can turn put it across in plainer English, people who coo over the Odyssey in Greek or Genesis in Hebrew will be only slightly less annoying than people who claim you couldn't possibly understand world news without having grown up/studied/gone sightseeing in the countries involved.
But I was felled, two-thirds of the way through chapter one (on Greek), by the jargon of grammarians, who rival literary theorists for "explanations" designed to stamp out any interest the public might show in their fields. The vocabulary of tenses and cases was clearly invented as a way of tormenting children in British public schools, and it makes the words on the page turn to cuneiform. Unless a writer arises who can turn put it across in plainer English, people who coo over the Odyssey in Greek or Genesis in Hebrew will be only slightly less annoying than people who claim you couldn't possibly understand world news without having grown up/studied/gone sightseeing in the countries involved.
October 10, 2021
2,5* for the audiobook. The book in itself was interesting but not the best material for the audiobook. I feel like I retained zero information.
July 8, 2024
4 stars for educational intent and the author’s enthusiasm, 2 stars for style; this was boring, boring, boring; this should be revised into a volume half its size and redacted for style to make it accessible to a general audience in stead of the occasional interested language aficionado.
July 23, 2021
Excellent read for those who love language and linguistics!
This book is thorough, detailed and precise on is description of the language it discusses. The author clearly knows his field. I particularly appreciated that these old languages are presented as languages that has all the characteristics of natural human language: although they certainly had their own character, they were not fundamentally different in some way from languages spoken today, in the sense that they were more exact or "better", or even more "logical" somehow. They were human languages, and this book presents wonderful sketches of what that were really like.
This book is thorough, detailed and precise on is description of the language it discusses. The author clearly knows his field. I particularly appreciated that these old languages are presented as languages that has all the characteristics of natural human language: although they certainly had their own character, they were not fundamentally different in some way from languages spoken today, in the sense that they were more exact or "better", or even more "logical" somehow. They were human languages, and this book presents wonderful sketches of what that were really like.
July 20, 2022
this is probably more accessible if you have already studied linguistics beforehand
September 14, 2023
Nice introduction to several dead languages. Most interesting in the sections where he gets granular about the details of translation. Would recommend to the interested.
November 15, 2025
Although I enjoyed this book, it is definitely not for the average reader. Coulter H. George considers several ancient languages - including Greek, Latin, Old Irish, Old English, Sanskrit and Biblical Hebrew - in a very brief way, affording the reader the briefest taste of the language, but also enabling some comparisons among them. If you are a language nerd who enjoys learning about the finer points of grammar, you may well enjoy this, as I did. I listened to the audiobook, so I was also able to hear the languages read aloud (how accurate the pronunciations were, I am not qualified to comment on). But I think it would get boring fast for someone who wasn't into those kinds of details. He also makes an argument at the beginning of the book for learning an ancient language in order to be able to read texts in their own language, free from the issues that come with translating a text into another language.
At the end of the book, he does recommend further reading for those who would like to learn one of the language discussed.
It was highly informative, but some sections were a little dry to get through.
At the end of the book, he does recommend further reading for those who would like to learn one of the language discussed.
It was highly informative, but some sections were a little dry to get through.
July 11, 2025
Dead languages; most prominently, Greek and Latin, Old-Irish, Sanskrit, a bit of Old English and a few other Indo-European languages; with Hebrew the only non-member.
Clearly, the author had most to say about the two first ones, and discusses the very fine nuances there are due to the advanced grammatical tooling in those languages with all those tenses/moods/cases, allowing to fine-tune each work, and making it very hard to translate every last milligram of meaning. Quite fascinating!
The other languages get a bit less attention, though Old-Irish stands out as a particularly difficult language.
Overall, nicely written and much more thorough then e.g. Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global,yet the author keeps it from being too dry.
Clearly, the author had most to say about the two first ones, and discusses the very fine nuances there are due to the advanced grammatical tooling in those languages with all those tenses/moods/cases, allowing to fine-tune each work, and making it very hard to translate every last milligram of meaning. Quite fascinating!
The other languages get a bit less attention, though Old-Irish stands out as a particularly difficult language.
Overall, nicely written and much more thorough then e.g. Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global,yet the author keeps it from being too dry.
November 28, 2024
This book killed my interest in dead languages stone dead! (Ironically.)
If you want endless, tedious and physically painful dissections of the various tenses, clauses and what have you of the ancient languages which are beaten to death by the author of this book; desperate to learn about the difference between the accusative and past progressive forms in ancient Greek. etc, then be my guest! But for anyone who like me who's never been able to learn another language, but *Thought* that they'd be fascinated to learn more about the beauty and poetry of the original languages in which definitive works such as the Bible and the Odyssey were written, this is like taking a writing class in the belief that you'll learn how to write fiction, only to spend the entire time being forced to learn the 'Correct' way to copy out the alphabet!
If you want endless, tedious and physically painful dissections of the various tenses, clauses and what have you of the ancient languages which are beaten to death by the author of this book; desperate to learn about the difference between the accusative and past progressive forms in ancient Greek. etc, then be my guest! But for anyone who like me who's never been able to learn another language, but *Thought* that they'd be fascinated to learn more about the beauty and poetry of the original languages in which definitive works such as the Bible and the Odyssey were written, this is like taking a writing class in the belief that you'll learn how to write fiction, only to spend the entire time being forced to learn the 'Correct' way to copy out the alphabet!
November 18, 2020
This book transported me back to my college days, when I studied the history of English, Celtic literature, and French. Ten plus years later though...I have to admit I zoned out often. The grammatical terminology and phonetics felt familiar but just. wouldn't. click. I felt like a former sprinter who now can only muster a power-walk!
The passage of time aside, I do have a better glimpse into the history of IE languages and enjoyed seeing how words shifted across time and locations. The inclusion of Sanskrit appealed to me the most, and it was intriguing to see how it branched from its western sister tongues.
The passage of time aside, I do have a better glimpse into the history of IE languages and enjoyed seeing how words shifted across time and locations. The inclusion of Sanskrit appealed to me the most, and it was intriguing to see how it branched from its western sister tongues.
November 23, 2023
This is a fantastic book for anyone interested in linguistics and literature. The author melds the two together in a seamless survey of some great languages and their literary traditions. I think more time could have been spent on Old England and Sanskrit, especially because those two have such a profound literary heritage but their chapters are half the length of Greek and Latin. For Sanskrit especially, I think the chapter would have profited from a more extensive discussion of what makes Sanskrit unique from other Indo-European languages, namely the unique features that derive from contact with Dravidian and Austronesian languages.
July 25, 2025
This book is like snacking on various old grammars and phonologies of ancient languages including Latin, Greek, Old English, Ancient Hebrew, Old Irish, and Sanskrit. I did enjoy the languages I knew a little about such as Latin, Greek, English, and Hebrew (because it is so much like Arabic), Sanskrit and Old Irish were less interesting and left me a little more lost. The grammar bits were more interesting than the phonologies. I think this is the kind of book that needs to be both read and listened to. I would only recommend if you are somewhat curious about how languages work. Otherwise, move along.
November 18, 2023
A fine overview of several Indo-European languages and Biblical Hebrew, full of linguistic detail; far more than a casual reader will absorb, but designed to reinforce an understanding of the commonalities in IE languages and the process of language change.
Most fascinating, and new to me, mention of Calvert Watkins How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, on reconstructing PIE poetics by comparing common poetical phraseology in daughter traditions, just as the PIE was reconstructed from comparing words, morphology and syntax.
Most fascinating, and new to me, mention of Calvert Watkins How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, on reconstructing PIE poetics by comparing common poetical phraseology in daughter traditions, just as the PIE was reconstructed from comparing words, morphology and syntax.
March 1, 2024
Not easy to finish this one as an audiobook- print/ebook might be a more suitable format for it, for those who find that accessible (not me).
I was interested in all these old languages but the author/lecturer goes into a lot of technical detail and jargon before he simplifies some of that into lay terms. Also lots of translating one word at a time for long passages of text. I had to switch off for a lot of it til he returned to saying something i could grasp.
I was interested in all these old languages but the author/lecturer goes into a lot of technical detail and jargon before he simplifies some of that into lay terms. Also lots of translating one word at a time for long passages of text. I had to switch off for a lot of it til he returned to saying something i could grasp.
January 19, 2025
I honestly didn't know what to expect with this book. The fact that it has phonetics of almost every word was the most interesting thing to me and breaking it down from that. I listened to this book and I highly recommend this or have the book and follow along. This book by Coulter George shouldn't be read any other way in my opinion. This read really breaks down words and where they come from. If you enjoy words and history you may enjoy this too.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 16, 2020
I'm not giving this book a higher rating because I misunderstood what it would be about! I thought it would be a sort of "fun facts" book on all the languages covered. While it definitely did contain some fun facts, it was far more an educational book on the linguistics of the languages, rather than the languages specifically. Not a bad book; just not what I thought it would be.
June 8, 2022
Mightily dense with information - a slow read - but enjoyable and frequently fascinating. A treat for etymology nerds and wannabe-linguists. Audiobook narration indispensable for pronunciation. Definitely makes me want to get my Greek textbook out again. I had no idea how insanely complicated Old Irish is.
December 20, 2022
A gentle introduction to Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, Middle Welsh, and Classical Hebrew. It helps if you have experience with at least one of these languages to orient yourself; once he gets in the morphological and semantic weeds it’s easy to get a bit lost. Nevertheless, this is highly accessible, and gives a really nice glimpse into the flavors of these languages.
April 16, 2023
This book manages the rare feat of being very concise , in-depth and readable. It covers 7 languages in 200 pages, somehow in a few pages diving deep enough into the phonology and grammar to give a clear idea of the unique character of each. Probably better suited to a reader who has a basic familiarity with the history of Proto Indo European.
August 5, 2023
Solid work, taking up curious features of six dead languages: ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish (+Welsh) and Hebrew; often from the point of view of the challenges presented to translators, especially translators of poetry who wish to convey some flavour of the original, going beyond mere meaing.
November 3, 2020
3.5 stars
It's a really interesting book about ancient languages, and the author does the job well. I did find it a little dry and textbooky in certain parts though, but it would probably be smoother reading if I had taken a linguistics class in college or something.
It's a really interesting book about ancient languages, and the author does the job well. I did find it a little dry and textbooky in certain parts though, but it would probably be smoother reading if I had taken a linguistics class in college or something.
July 21, 2023
A very good book, but not a great book for me. Other readers have noted that this is probably more accessible for those who have studied linguistics, and as a complete linguistics layman, I found it very dense.
December 4, 2024
It would probably be helpful to have some sort of language background before going into this, but if you want to understand how other languages work (even just in general), then I think you'll walk away with a better understanding of them.
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