Linguistics expert Glenn Dixon explores the oddities of languange in the 50-plus countries he's visited.
Pilgrim in the Palace of Words: A Journey Through the 6,000 Languages of Earth: Glenn Dixon
Dundurn Press, 2009
Glenn Dixon is a Canadian expert in socio-linguistics with a tendency to wander. These accounts, from some of the 50-plus countries he’s visited, are interspersed with insights into how their languages developed. He brings academic notions like linguistic relativity to life for the lay person, using examples from places as varied as Jerusalem, Tibet, Cambodia, Ecuador, and northern Canada. In the middle of an account of getting lost on a snowy night in the Rockies, he launches into an explanation of how differently the concept of snow is handled in Inuktitut.