Concise compendium of the world's languages

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From Afrikaans to Zulu, almost 100 languages from the comprehensive Compendium of the World's Languagesare featured in this new concise version. Many articles have been revised.

The Concise Compendiumpresents a detailed comparative study of the major and many of the lesser known languages of the world. Included are representatives of all language families, with samples of Amerindian, such as Navajo and of African languages, such as Fulani and Nama; languages of politically independent groups in the former USSR, like Uzbek and Belorussian; those of political pressure groups, such as Breton and Catalan and significant community/ethnic languages, including Amharic and Vietnamese.

Throughout, the treatment is factual and jargon-free. Articles are ordered alphabetically and each has a standard structure for ease of reference:

* general historical and sociolinguistic introduction
* writing system
* sound system
* grammatical system
A passage from the Gospel of St. John illustrates each language with a written tradition. These scripts are explained in an appendix at the end of the book.
Presents 100 of the world's major languages and representatives of different language groups, politically significant languages and particularly interesting ones.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The audience for this work is both limited and hard to define; perhaps only those who want a linguistic sampler but do not want to pay the price of the original two-volume product will benefit. Even that audience will not be perfectly served, since this version features frequent cross-references to the more expensive set. Specialists will no doubt find fault with the selections included; one odd exclusion is that of Celtic languages except Welsh. The omitted general article is sorely needed. The criterion for selection was statistical: languages listed here are (in general) those with the greatest number of contemporary speakers. Therefore no ancient languages should be included; Latin and ancient Greek, for example, appear only in the two-volume set. But one does find Sanskrit and classical Chinese, which suggests a politically correct agenda biased against European languages. If linguistics are important, libraries would do well to acquire the two-volume set. N. F. George; Kenyon College