語言學習外文書藉的部落格

When Chinese shopkeepers tried to find a written equivalent of Coca-Cola, one set of characters they chose was pronounced “ke-kou ke-la.” It sounded right, but it literally translated as “bite the wax tadpole.” Language, like travel, is always stranger than we expect, and is often more beautiful than we imagine. In BITING THE WAX TADPOLE, Elizabeth Little takes a decidedly unstuffy and accessible tour of the world’s languages–from Lithuanian noun declensions and imperfective Russian verbs to Ancient Greek and Esperanto.

With exuberance and wit, Little reveals that daring to move beyond monolingual isolation leads to nothing less than an astonishing diversity of the human experience. Fully illustrated and including hilarious sidebars, BITING THE WAX TADPOLE is a must-have for the language lover’s bookshelf.