Limits of Language: Almost Everything You Didn't Know You Didn't Know about Language and Languages

by Mikael Parkvall

Answers all your questions about language...even the ones you never thought to ask.

How did...
• the discovery of a mysterious Persian mummy lead to a murder investigation?
• the word "dord" come to appear in English, and then disappear again?
• a border collie named Rico learn 200 words?

What is...
• the loudest language?
• the worst dictionary ever?
• the most difficult word to translate?

When did...
• the United States surpass Britain in having the most speakers of English?
• the first linguist live?
• Mayor Willie Brown declare "Esperanto Day" in San Francisco?

Who was...
• the oldest first language learner?
• the creator of the most successful invented language?
• the discoverer of the brain's "language center"?

Where is...
• the country that is the most linguistically diverse?
• the most newspare-reading country?
• the school with the most renowned faculty of linguistics?

Why did...
• Johannes Goropius Becanus regard Dutch as the oldest language?
• native speakers of Navajo work as radio-telegraphists in WWII?
• a Zimbabwean bank director speak for 36 hours straight?

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Writing, Science, Reference, History

466 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Limits of Language" arrived today from Amazon. I've never smoked crack, but reading this book approximates what I imagine it would feel like -- an initial rush of pure pleasure, followed by the irresistible craving for just one more bump, yielding to that craving over and over until - six hours later - you find yourself surrounded by cats not fed, laundry not done, unwashed dishes, unpaid bills, and yet you still can't stop yourself. You want more. You want it to last forever. Damn you, Mikael Parkvall! How could you write a book that caters so brilliantly to my utter fascination with words and all things language-related? And be so smart and funny too?

I just tore myself away to feed the cats and pass this message along to goodreads members. There are still three shopping weeks until Christmas. Nobody else appears to be listing this book. So - if you know anyone with an interest in words or language - buy them a copy. Their puppy-like gratitude will last all year. Heck, now that it's out in paperback, you can get your own copy for less than twenty bucks.

A pdf preview of the detailed table of contents and the first 19 pages is here:

http://www.wmjasco.com/limits/LLPrevi...

The table of contents at the link above is very detailed, but fails to capture the author's wit, and the sheer geekish zaniness of some of the topics. Some highlights -

A 30-page "linguist's calendar", marking the anniversary of various linguistic milestones (e.g. 'birth of Kanzi, the most talking ape there is';'the Dalmatian language becomes extinct, when the last surviving speaker accidentally steps on a landmine') giving linguists an excuse to celebrate throughout the year.

Habla Usted Phrase-Bookish? A side-splitting selection of useless phrases culled from phrasebooks around the world. For instance -
"At what time were these branches eaten by the rhinoceros?" "I have my own syringe". "The beast had a human body, the feet of a buck, and a horn on its head". "I don't play the violin, but I love cheese".

Untranslatable Words: e.g. the Kuot word aFone "to drink from a bottle in such a fashion that drool trickles from the mouth back into the bottle", the Czech umudrovat se "to philosophize oneself into the madhouse", or the Ciluba word ilunga "a person who is willing to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time".

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to reading about the word's most dadaistic verb morphology*.

I don't play the violin, but I LOVE this book!



* Oh, OK. Here is the paragraph in question:

Linguists are supposed to take languages seriously. We are not supposed to laugh at them. So, apologies to all Kobon speakers out there, but I just can't help it. The prize for the language with the verb morphology most looking like it had been thought up by Tristan Tzara must go to Kobon. If there are any sceptics among the readers, here follows the suffixal paradigm for the counterfactual mood in Kobon:

1sg -- bnep 1du -- blop 1pl -- bnop
2sg -- bnap 2du -- blep 2pl -- bep
3sg -- böp 3du -- blep 3pl -- blap

[C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished! And it was amazing, though the humour did get a little on the clunky side towards the end. I would like also to note that Parkvall uses the feminine pronoun as the default. In any case, I think I know what I'll be getting for my birthday this year.

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I suppose it's too much to hope that a book such as this would be completely accurate, but it certainly seems to come as close as a book could. Parkvall cites his sources meticulously, and explains his methodology with clarity and fluency whenever clarification is necessary.

And then I get to the bit about linguistics departments, and find that while Sydney apparently has two, Melbourne is not mentioned at all! And yet I have had personal interactions with no less than three (yes, three!) linguistics departments in this very city: at Melbourne, Monash and Latrobe Universities. I suppose it's possible that two of them don't comply with the specific definition of a linguistics department Parkvall uses, but from what I know of them (and I just looked up Latrobe's website to be sure), they are all fully-fledged and complete.

Of course I only noticed this because as an Australian and a Melburnian I suffer from a massive inferiority complex, but it does have to make one doubt the - thoroughness, I suppose - of the rest of his research.
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Colour terms in different languages are something that I find very interesting, and in fact for a while I wanted to be a linguistic anthropologist because of it. That was probably just a phase, but colour terms are still pretty great. Apart from Piraha, which is a very odd South American language, every language has at least two basic colour terms, translatable as 'black' and 'white' or 'light' and 'dark'. One study (Berlin and Kay, 1969) looked at the order in which further colour terms were added to a language's vocabulary. In other words, if a language had three colour terms, the third would almost invariably be 'red'. If a language had four, the fourth would be either blue or green, followed I think by yellow and then by blue or green, whichever hadn't already been used by that language. The largest number of basic colour terms according to Parkvall is twelve, in Hungarian and Russian. English has eleven.

Parkvall doesn't explain the terminology very well. What defines a 'basic' colour term? He says that even languages with only two basic colour terms are able to express other colours, just as English is able to express colours such as cyan and magenta. There's a better outline of criteria here. But anyway. Very interesting stuff.

Wikipedia also tells me that this typical ordering of colour terms may have to do with the function of retinal cells in the eye. This means that this hypothesis may contradict the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that perception is shaped by language rather than the other way around.

Of course, though, there are exceptions to every rule, and of various degrees of bizarreness. Russian, for example, distinguishes between dark and light blue as basic colour terms, and Hungarian between bright and dark red. According to Wikipedia, "To Russian speakers, [dark blue:] and [light blue:] are as separate as red and pink and orange and brown." Tsakhur in central Asia has a basic colour term for turquoise. Jaqaru in South America has basic colour terms for shocking pink, burgundy, reddish brown and wine red. Ainu in Japan has one colour term covering red and green and another covering blue and yellow.

How wonderfully varied is the diversity of human existence! And what a shame it would be to lose any of this diversity. Or, I should say, any more of this diversity than has already been lost.
__________________________

Some hilarious gems in the chemical names section. 'Arsole', 'moronic acid', 'uranate', all named (at least it seems) without a trace of irony. And then there is the marvellous 'penguinone', so named because its chemical structure looks a bit like a penguin.

In biology, species are named using words derived from Latin. Or words that look like they have been derived from Latin, as the case may in fact be.

Some wonderful examples:
Ytu Brutus (a beetle)
Vini vidivici (a parrot)
Verae peculya (a wasp)
Ba humbugi (a snail)
Anticlimax (a fossil gastropod) - presumably these last two were not exactly what they were hoping to find...
Two species named after Zaphod Beeblebrox
A salamander genus Oedipus with species rex and complex
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English As She is Spoke

I actually lol'ed. And I hardly ever lol! LOLOLOLOLOLOL

(I'm being descriptive, you see.)
_________________________

Some points this book has brought up:

1. I know everyone already knows this, but seriously, Korean? Most crazy freaking AWESOME writing system ever??? YES.

2. In the section entitled Some individuals who have had a disproportionate influence on language development:

"One of the major linguistic innovators in world history is undoubtedly God. In the book Genesis, we learn that after creating day, night, heaven, earth and the seas, God coined precisely these names for them (Genesis 2). He was not alone in this task, however, for after the creation of man (so named in Genesis 5), Adam was there to help him, and in fact invented more names than did his heavenly father.

Among Adam's first words were not - as some palindromic aficionados would have it - "Madam, I'm Adam", but rather "She shall be called Woman", and so Adam started his naming career. Later (Genesis 2:19), God showed him all the animals he had created, so that Adam could bestow suitable names on them. Given biologists' estimates that there are tens of millions of animal species in the world, Adam must surely be the most active word inventor in the history of mankind."

Take THAT, literal-interpreters-of-the-Bible!

3. Apparently, in Iceland telephone directories are arranged according to given name rather than surname. Also, Korea once used alphabetical order to fuck with Japan, and no one has any idea where alphabetical order comes from. WOW

And so far I have only one tiny complaint about this Guinness-world-records-cum-Ripley's-believe-it-or-not-of-language. Parkvall is clearly not a writer. He is a linguist (not to imply that linguists are bad writers; just that they are not writers). He can be very witty in places, but it's generally not very well expressed. Now, if Oscar Wilde wrote this book, or even Ian McEwan, it would be truly flawless. What it needs is someone who can write sparkling, elegant prose and who can save the punchline until the end. Oh yeah, and a good editor would be nice too. It's full of typos.

Nonetheless, his writing is not bad; it's definitely above average for the general population, it just that it falls short of attaining the dizzying heights of brilliance of its subject matter. Still not enough to tip it off a five-star rating, so far, anyway.
_______________________

This book is INCREDIBLE. Read:

In continuum situations... language boundaries are difficult to establish, and at the most, isoglosses can be identified. Thus, the fact that Serbian and Macedonian - as opposed to Bulgarian - used [c:] or [tsh:] as a reflex of proto-Slavic *tj was exploited by Serbian nationalist Aleksandar Belic in 1919 to support Serbia's claim to most of what is today Macedonia. On the other hand, the use of a suffixed definite article in Macedonian (as well as in Bulgarian, but not in most varieties of Serbian) was sufficient for some Bulgarian writers to demonstrate that not only Macedonia, but also the Timok-Morava valley in southern Serbia should really be under Bulgarian jurisdiction.

Did you know that? I don't think you did. Did you know also that the languages Nootka and Quileute have special prefixes that you use when you are talking to 'funny persons', small-sized men, hunchbacks, cross-eyed persons and lame persons? Did you know that in a way Italian is the most widespread language on earth because it exists in the top ten languages in four out of six continents?

I'm pretty sure you didn't know any of that. I certainly didn't. I have no words to describe how good this is.
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The Melbourne Library Service is slower than Amazon, but in the end reliable! I am very excited.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is hardly any point in doing a review of this book when David has done this one - http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/.... And Choupette has done this one - http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....

I finished this today – there is something to be said for getting the flu. The end wasn’t nearly as good at some of the stuff at the start, but there was still enough to keep me interested.

One of my favourite bits was called Kofi walk go market – ‘Well, this is the other one, which translates as “Kofi goes to the market”. It is, of course, essential that all example sentences in Kwa languages contain a character named Kofi’. When I was learning Italian I decided that it was essential that somewhere in the book there had to be a Signor Rossi. It is nice to see that these traditions also exist in other languages

But I’m not going to go through all of the bits I liked in this book, mostly because it would take all night. I learnt a lot from this and because this book is so amusing and written with so much love for the subject and delight in presenting interesting facts and figures, I got to learn things in a way that made it feel like I wasn’t learning anything at all. But it is remarkable how often I’ve found myself bringing up something I’ve found out from this book in conversations.

Perhaps my favourite bit in the book was on page 161 about Soresol – The Musical Language – a language that has all of it words based on the musical scale. That is, the only syllables that exist in the language are do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti. So, not only can you communicate by singing the words of the language, but also by piano, if you needed to.

Every other page of this book has a fact about language I had never heard of before. It is a word lover’s chocolate box. I can’t recommend this book too highly.

Oh, there is also a section on famous quotes you need to know if you are a linguist – naturally, this includes Chomsky’s ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ – to prove that a sentence can be syntactically fine and still not make any sense. But the quote that isn’t mentioned in the book is Wittgenstein’s ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world’ – and given the title of this one I would have thought that might have rated a mention somewhere.

A pure delight, but strangely not available in Australian bookshops. Can’t for the life of me imagine why not.

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mikael Parkvall is a linguist who is fascinated by language. If you're not equally fascinated, it's probably because you simply don't know enough about it. In LoL, Parkvall does his best to rectify that by pulling together every unusual, quirky, unexpected and sometimes downright hilarious fact about language you can possibly imagine, along with quite a few you can't.

This book does not have a narrative structure. Rather, it picks a topic - say, "How Many Words Are There?" or "Language Myths," and then presents a series of short essays on the subject. While I was disappointed to learn that Coca Cola doesn't really mean "Bite the Wax Tadpole" when transliterated into Chinese, discovering that some versions mean "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice" was an acceptable consolation.

I found the sections of this book which tend to address language as it relates to broader life to be the most interesting. Learning about things like the legal implications of languages in certain countries and how linguistics can be used in forensics was fascinating. Other sections, in which he addresses the more technical aspects of parts of speech, were less compelling to me, which may be why it took me over a year to finish this book.

Ultimately, I found myself skimming some of those sections in favor of the more intriguing and delightful parts, such as "The Ten Silliest Names of Molecules" (Moronic Acid, anyone?). While this book may be a little more detailed in some parts than I personally need, there is more than enough of interest overall to make it worth seeking out.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a bit of a disappointment: Not quite what I was expecting. As the author himself notes in his introduction, it's a Guiness Book of World Records-like compilation of factoids about language and linguistics. There's some interesting "stuff" but there's also a lot of "stuff" that's not, and most of the entries are frustratingly short.

And - the copy editor in me froths - the typos are legion. The most egregious pops up on page 320 of my edition where the entry "Person Marking on Nouns" is repeated verbatim. The only difference being that the non-English words in the second entry are italicized.

And and - the typesetting can be problematic. A lot of entriesgetscruncheddownlikethis or spread out like this. It looks like someone threw the book together on a version of PageMaker.

[Jafar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Main Entry: lim-it
Pronunciation: \ˈli-mət\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French limite, from Latin limit-, limes boundary
Date: 14th century
1 a : something that bounds, restrains, or confines b : the utmost extent

I picked up this book thinking that it was about the limits of language as in the things that language cannot express. That really intrigued me. How can one write a book and explore, using words, the things that language cannot express? It turned out that the book is about the limits of language as in exploring its extremes and its far-out corners. Different, but not any less interesting.

This book completely challenges what you think is possible in language. Picky any part and aspect of language that you like, and Parkvall gives you such extreme and bizarre examples of it, from actual existing languages, that you never thought was possible. It completely demolishes your understanding and expectations of how language should behave and how its parts should function. If you have a casual interest in linguistics and think that you’ve read your share of language quirks, think again. If you’re an innocent English speaker who thinks that language means object + tensed verb + subject, you may have a heart attack from this book.

But in the end, you may feel at a loss with this book. Parkvall doesn’t tell you what his point is. The book lacks purpose and direction. It’s like a giant linguistic trivia book. They amaze and amuse you greatly, but eventually you feel overwhelmed by them. I also wish that the author had kept his sense of humor out of the book. There’s plenty of entertainment in the facts.

It’s a dogma of linguistics that all languages are equally expressive, i.e., there’s no idea that can be conveyed in one language, but not equally well in another language. This book makes you wonder about that. I would really like to hear a hunter from an Australian aboriginal tribe whose language doesn’t have a word for a number higher than three discuss the bonuses given out at Goldman Sachs.

[Georg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitively everything (and more) I didn't know I didn't know about languages. And one of the most beautiful Douglas Adams-non-quotes I have ever read:

"Kiowa uses a curious way of number marking somtimes referred to as "inversive marking". The same morpheme, in Kiowa -go indicates singular or plural depending on which number is the least expected." (p. 305)

So the book would deserve 5 stars but I had to reduce one of them due to the redundant use of exclamation marks!

[Dokusha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dieses Buch ist eine Art Äquivalent zum "Guiness Buch der Rekorde", nur halt auf Sprachen bezogen. Allerding führt es nicht nur Rekorde auf (soweit dies möglich ist, da es oft keine verläßlichen oder eindeutig meßbaren Zahlen gibt), sondern auch allerhand Kurioses, viele interessante Fakten zu Sprachen und Sprache im Allgemeinen und auch zu Linguisten.
Das Themengebiet ist dabei sehr weit gefächert, wie man auch an den beispielhaften Fragen aus der Verlagsbeschreibung sehen kann, und reicht von der Verteilung und Sprecherzahl der Sprachen über deren Lautstrukturen, Wortschatz, Grammatik und Schrift über politische Entscheidungen, populäre Vorurteile und Irrmeinnugen bis hin zu Daten über Sprachforscher und sprachliche Denkmäler (ja, auch die gibt es!). Auch Kunstsprachen sowie das Erlernen von Sprache durch Tiere und Findelkinder wird erwähnt.
All dies wird in einem lockeren und über weite Strecken auch humorigen Ton vorgestellt, ohne daß die wissenschaftliche Exaktheit darunter leidet. Eine lange Liste weiterführender Literatur und Quellen sowie ein umfangreiches Glossar runden das Ganze ab. Insgesamt ein unbedingt empfehlenswertes Buch für jeden, der sich für das Thema interessiert.

[André · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is great! Hilarious! So many interesting trivia facts about languages and language in general. And also about linguistics and linguists. Plus, everything is well-sourced. I love the author's way of writing. "Limits of Languages" is really entertaining. I wonder if the abbreviation of the title is on purpose.

[Soobie is expired · Rating 3 out of 5]

For what bathroom books are concerned, this one is a perfect example. Lots of teeny-tiny entries that were made to be savored while relaxing...

There were tons of facts out there. Some of them were curious, some of them... well, I didn't get them... Some other time I recognize a joke but I didn't understand the linguistic humor behind it. I guess a sort of map was necessary, though. The author mentioned tons of languages I didn't even know existed.

It started good, with all the curiosity. Then it got a little bit too technical. The last part, the day-by-day calendar of linguistic events was a bit weird to read. I mean, there were tons of last speaker of «insert language here» and some events were repeated three or four times. Like the deaf guy who killed someone because the voices in his her were telling him to do it... No, sorry, the signing hands in his head were telling him to kill. Well, it came up a lot.

In the end, it was the perfect bathroom reading, it had tons of short chapters unrelated to each other, and it was funny.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so glad people brought this book to my attention. Forget the deep epistemological implications of Parkvall's title: modeled after The Guinness Book of World Records with blurb-style entries on various topics (longest, greatest, smallest, rarest, etc.), Limits ends up as basically a "News of the Weird" for language lovers. While this book is sort of, kind of intended as a serious reference work, it's hard to know when to take Parkvall seriously.

In these pages, you will discover the following:

- The Danish reductionist tongue-twister "Ove og Age over oje og ore i ar." (Ove and Age train their eyes and ears this year.) (p. 93)

- Useful phrasebook sentences like, "How much is that in real money?" and "I'd like to go to a Komsomol party," and "Don't pester the girls in the next tent." (The last one in Welsh, no less.) (p. 140)

- Gorilla Koko's impressive grasp of American Sign Language ("Fine nipple.... Foot, foot, good.") (p. 148)

- The story of three frustrated MIT students who in 2005 used a computer-generated language program to submit (and have accepted!) a nonsensical conference paper entitled "Rooter: a methodology for the typical unification of access points and redundancy." (p. 156)

- An actual experiment in 1970 revealed that Turkish was the loudest spoken language. (It involved much shouting by native speakers at various distances.) (p. 263)

- The fact that "The feeling of emptiness created by the lack of a rhino can probably be expressed in any language." (p. 297 - complete with illustration!)

- An ideal means for demonstrating the ability of four-year-olds to master grammatical concepts (as opposed to merely absorbing new vocabulary) is to say, "This is a wug. This is another wug. Now we have two...??" (p. 375)

I could go on ad nauseam, but I'll stop there. Suffice it to say that this is the kind of book which properly belongs on the back of your most oft-used toilet. I mean that in a really good way.

[Claire S]

Wow, glorious!

[Kate]

David Giltinan keeps this on the "snort milk through your nose" shelf. That's exactly what I'm looking for in a book. I'll pick it up next time I'm in the US.

[Hans Henrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linguistics

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

great content, terrible editing and layout.

[Steve Clark]

Paperback