 Hello everyone. I'm back here with another video and this one is a review a book review now I've said before actually that I wouldn't do any more book reviews on this channel unless they had to do with like business and Entrepreneurship like you know stuff I'm do freelancing or with language Language and literature stuff like that because you know as freelance translators we deal with languages This has to do with language. It's it doesn't have to do with with a translation per se But it does have to do with languages and I found it extremely interesting and I enjoyed a lot I enjoy anything on languages, so I am going to do a review of it Hopefully you guys have some interest in languages, you know since you're interested in translation So you should find it interesting as well. This this book is called empires of the word a language history of the world and It's by Nicholas Ostler Who's a British author? From Oxford and who speaks something like what is it? I thought it says maybe it says it online. I looked it up something It says he has working knowledge of like 26 different languages or something anyway This is a fascinating book absolutely fascinating goes through the history of a bunch of different languages All throughout the world and more specifically it talks about why some languages stick why some of them thrive why some of them thrived in the past and Why some of them don't stick at all and and you know aren't You know and aren't spoken as much some of them are spoken a lot and some of them very little and he's trying to see the reason why and it's not as clear as you would think because Here are my notes. Oh, and actually while I'm at it. I should talk about it I think I've have I might have mentioned it before or not, but whenever I read I always use this I've gone through all different things of writing in books not wanting to write in books having a note And things and that and we're going on the first page and just writing stuff, but I found this online I can't remember where but if you look for it the fast book outliner I don't know if you can read that And it's they have different versions I like this version 3 because what it lets you do is circle the pages where you see things and then write notes about it here and When it comes to something like this about languages, you know I'm definitely doing that because there's a whole lot of stuff that I found that I find really interesting and And so I found myself just taking notes throughout the whole thing So anyway, let me get into it a bit just to give you an idea what it's about Like I said, it's about languages spreading. Why some languages spread and why some don't You'd think, you know, like some people say well, it's just conquering and like imperialism, right? You know, that's why English is spoken all over the place and Spanish and you know other place because you know They conquered and overtook and then and did all that stuff and that's true on the other hand It's not just that like that isn't you know because if you think about it the Mongolians took over a huge parts of the world and You know, none of them are speaking Mongolian Manchurians did that they took over all of China The Qing dynasty is a Manchurian dynasty and yet no one speaks Manchurian now at all, you know But pretty much within a hundred years people stopped speaking Manchurian the Turks or Turkic people I should say they You know, they took over a whole lot of the world and now a lot of places do speak You know do have something in common with them, but they don't speak Turkish and You know, so there are a lot of things that a lot of places where people took over But the language never spread another one if you think about it are the German tribes The that you had the Roman Empire and then all these German tribes came and took over all the way from you know Italy to Spain to northern Africa even you know all of France France France is named after the Franks which was a German tribe and But none of these languages none of these places speak a Germanic language. They all speak Romance languages, so the Latin from before stuck but you know, why did the Latin take place of the Gaulish languages, but Germanic didn't take place of the Latin and Anyway, and you have a bunch of stuff like this other people say it's business and trade that does it But that's not true either You know, you could say oh English became big because of business and trade But the Dutch and the Portuguese they had bigger enterprises than the Brits did you know in their time and and their languages didn't stick aside from Brazil You know, obviously Portuguese stuck there. So why did why did this happen and in some places? And why did it not happen in other places? Turns out it's pretty complicated. That's why you need a whole book to talk about it By and large, you know, it's kind of like you would like you would think a not so fascinating Conclusion is that it's a combination But you know, there is more to it like you need settlers to go there can't just be traded can't just be business opportunities You need people who go there and you know want to establish their own lives there and they bring the language with them But then you need a bunch of other stuff anyway it and and Yeah, so it gets more complicated like you kind of need the whole book to talk about this and then each and he Starts talking about other, you know, various interesting things I have some of my notes that I wrote up on my Goodreads and and I have a lot more of the notes here I wrote up some of the main ones on Goodreads What do I have what would have been different if Alexander the Great had gone west rather than east This apparently is something people asked themselves because he did, you know Obviously he was fighting against the Persians at the time But then he kept going east but he just as well could have gone west throughout Europe And how different would Europe be now if he had done that Then what else Coptic? Oh Coptic version Coptic the the word Coptic, which is the Christians in Egypt now they're called Coptic Christians and they also use a different language Which is actually the closest to old Egyptian that we have which is basically the the old Egyptian It's a modern version of old Egyptian and Coptic the word comes from I guptos which was Greek for Egypt And anyway, that was interesting And what else does it talk about the Ramayana is an old Sanskrit story and it has a story just like the Trojan War Like a woman that was captured for her beauty and this and the other and so it's interesting You know, maybe the Trojan War took that part of the story from Or let's say the Iliad took part of that story from from some old Sanskrit story Talks about the Lugano alphabet, which I love because I grew up in Lugano Which is a town no one knows and but apparently they have a Lugano alphabet Which was a pretty big thing What else does it have printed books meant the deaths of Latin basically the line have been spreading around All around and it had been maintained throughout Europe But because of printed books suddenly people starting in Germany could print in their own language And they wanted to print in the language that People understood because with the printing press with Gutenberg's printing press You could suddenly print out pamphlets and and brochures or you know, what have you for all the common people to read And this is why stuff like that spreads like Martin Luther's 95 theses He he wrote those right when you had the printing press and so they could spread it around and spread like wildfires like the internet of its day What else? Oh christopher columbus christopher columbus thought he first thought he was in china in the What was that back then the mongolian empire of the cons And then he thought it was in india But basically after a month of arriving he realized he was wrong on both counts and he stopped calling the locals indios But the name indian stuck Either way just because of that month And uh, and now you know, they're still known as indians Incorrectly by many by many people Uh, I'm I'm talking about the native americans. Obviously Uh, what else ling of lingua franca is an expression you hear all the time and I've used it I didn't know that it stood actually for the french language Which was being used in the near east during the crusades. They called it lingua franca. Um, what else? Uh, oh, and then it you know, and then it talks about the future of language spreading and what's going to happen Like a lot of people think well, it's english everyone's going to be speaking english and that's it But you know, and there are a lot of things that point to how that could happen, but A lot of things point to how it might not happen In fact, we're guaranteed that it won't happen forever because no language lasts forever But uh, you the fact is most english speakers actually speak it as a second language now And that's the main reason why it's so widespread because everyone's learning at a second language But it's also a big reason why it could die out because you don't feel a particular You know affinity toward your second language and all it takes is one generation to decide Oh, no, I'm learning a different language as a second language and that's it And I guess into the intricacies like is english easier to learn than other languages And maybe that's why people are learning it but You know, that's kind of a weak argument and uh, so anyway, it's um I won't get into it too much. Just because I uh, I realized it doesn't have Precisely to do with translation. I just really like this book. And so I just wanted to talk about it a bit Once again, it's called empires of the word um, it's a language history of the world by nicholas austere Oskler, sorry And I'll link to my good reads account there in in the description below because that's where I you know Keep track of all the stuff I read And uh, and yeah, that's pretty much it. There's uh, I mean, there's a lot of interesting stuff in here Oh, including the old guarani word Sorry, okay, uh, so guarani is um Is a language they still speak a lot of around portugal and other parts of latin south america obviously was a native language from there um And uh, and it's one of the more successful ones because quite a few people still speak it Which again, they speak it for a combination of reasons Now i'm looking for my note in this because I don't want to miss out, but unfortunately, I can't find it so the guarani word for money is Let me get this right i'm totally going to mispronounce it, but guaripoti which Literally means excrement of the minds which kind of gives you an idea of what they thought of their new economy there that relied on all this Money that the that the spanish people wanted excrement of the minds. That's the word for money guaripoti um Anyway, I found that interesting either way once again, this is the book and Tune in next time for more videos I have more to do with freelance translation and this is kind of just as an aside and an interesting book I read and which I highly recommend If you have the chance to read it That's it for now. I'll talk to you next time. Thanks. Bye