The World in So Many Words: A Country-by-Country Tour of Words That Have Shaped Our Language (review)

220Reviews The World in So Many Words: A Country-by-Country Tour of Words That Have Shaped Our Language. 1999. Allan Metcalf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Pp. xviii + 298. $19.00. Seize the moment of excited curiosity for the acquisition of knowledge ." That saying became a family by-word when a librarian friend of mine was a girl, and, when that injunction was issued by her father at the dinner table, she or her brother would rush to the atlas, encyclopedia, or dictionary to uncover the facts. This same impulse animates Allan Metcalf in his genial global panorama of languages through the peephole provided by English words. As in his earlier book, America in So Many Words (with David Barnhart),1 we have separate essays on words — the length of each determined by what can fit on a couple of computer screens — in which the author's excited curiosity delivers up odd and amusing doses of knowledge. Metcalf makes no secret of his method: he has searched the etymologies in dictionaries available in electronic form, and then used a search engine to see what the Internet provides to supplement that information. Muntjac, from Sundanese (a language of Indonesia) , is the only word Metcalf has traced from American English to that language, and, having described the referent, he is able to quote Maryann Nash of Mom's Critters in Mantua, Ohio: "Muntjacs have a high-pitched bark and may bark up to an hour or more if they sense a predator or other threat. I have yet to hear mine bark" (176). Life for the muntjac in small-town Ohio seems to be remarkably tranquil. Similarly the tranquil (because extinct) baluchithere (from Baluchi, a language of Pakistan and Iran) is celebrated in only one full-size replica — it is nineteen feet tall and thirty feet long. That's in the Wyo-braska Museum of Natural History and 10th and U streets in in Gering, Nebraska. It's a copy of an extinct model at the University of Nebraska, which had to be put down because it contained asbestos. Not satisfied with these minute particulars, Metcalf adds a further fact: "Aside from the Wyo-braska Museum, the only place you can find baluchitheres nowadays is in the role-playing game, RuneQuest" (128). The World in So Many Words is a gallimaufry of such specimens. It's hard for Metcalf to hide his delight in his discoveries, and hard for a reviewer to refrain from quoting them. So, for divan (from Turkish) we find "The welcom1 [Wayne Glowka reviewed the previous book in Dictionaries 20 (1999): 163168 .]— Ed. Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 22 (2001) Reviews221 ing divan is both subject and title of a recent song by Smudge (Tom Morgan) performed by Evan Dando of The Lemonheads with the refrain 'You can crash out on my divan'" (118). One more: "If your neighborhood grocer doesn't have it, you can order Kettle Fresh Prune Lekvar from Bunge Foods of Atlanta. It comes in forty-four gallon containers" (49). (Lekvarwas chosen to represent Slovak.) AsJames A. H. Murray famously wrote (in the "General Explanations" to the OED), "the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference" (I.xxvii) , and it would be wrong to fault Metcalf for picking some languages rather than others or this word rather than that. His prevailing metaphor to explain how the words he discusses got into English is that they "immigrated," as if huddled masses of vocables pressed forward toward the golden door of admission to the language. "Aspiring words also "swim" into English (250), and fortunate are those who make it safe to shore. "Even though there are so many immigrant words, it is still a distinction for a language to have contributed to the English vocabulary" (xii) . The words themselves are the agents of the process, and quite a different book might have been written if there had been an attempt to present the less savory aspects of the penetration of English-speakers into the domains of other languages — say, assegai (ult. < Berber), épée (< French), kris (< Malay), kukri (< Nepalese), saber (ult. < Hungarian), scimitar (< Italian), shiv (?< Romany ), or blunderbuss (< Dutch), howitzer (< Czech), KaL·shnikov (< Russian). (Etymological information in this review comes from The New Oxford Dictionary ofEnglish) . Metcalf's history makes a merrier tale than the story of these words would have. Metcalf makes himself vulnerable, however, when he claims that the word he hasjust discussed is the only word of that origin in English. So, for instance , he claims that cashmere and Kashmiri are the only words from Kashmiri. Yet The New Oxford Dictionary ofEnglish offers shahtoosh 'high-quality wool from the neck hair of the Himalayan ibex' and shikira 'houseboat'. In discussing obeah 'sorcery', Metcalf asserts that "The general vocabulary of English has no other words from Efik," a language of Nigeria. But the same dictionary gives these words from Efik: angwantibo 'a small rare nocturnal primate of west central Africa, related to the potto', eserine 'another term for physostigmine', and bukra "US àf W. Indian informal, chiefly derogatory a white person, especially a man." Never, he might perhaps have declared, say never. A prefatory declaration does provide some degree of caution (xiv) , but more might have been allocated to these expressions of certainty. Metcalf's method has an interesting consequence: "Our tour will stop at only one word for each language — with the exception of French and Latin, which get two apiece because they are so important" (xii) . Since some 200 languages are treated, this decision means that the tour soon leaves the familiar world of European languages behind and moves in the direction of Timbuktu (treated as a general word for a remote place in Metcalf's discussion of Mali, 222Reviews 66-67) . So we learn that Sindhi is the fiftieth most populous language community in the modern world, with twenty million speakers (129), yet it has "given" just one word to English, dhandh 'seasonal wetland'. Most of the languages mentioned will not be familiar to readers — Yuwaalaraay, for instance, or Chaga. They will finish the book with some new ideas — assuming anyone other than a reviewer will read it from first page to last, since it is so fine a book for "dipping." They will come away with the idea that there are 6,000 languages in the world; yet only 200 or so have provided words to English, and the greatest number of those 200 has given only a few words, or maybejust one. "Healthy languages," David Crystal reminds us, "are always borrowing from each other, and vocabulary is always changing between old and young generations" (2000, 23). But the ecology of language is now being transformed . All seems well when we contemplate the estimate that there are 6,000 or so languages. But half of them are likely to be gone a century from now; another take on the same numbers is that "at least one language must die, on average , every two weeks or so" (Crystal 2000, 19). The parallels between linguistic and genetic diversity are disturbingly obvious. Without a richly diverse pool of languages (or genes), the entire population is threatened. We should learn from our tour, not that there are so many languages that have contributed to English, but so few — and the number is dwindling. Metcalf's book might well have been written in a similar way a century ago, since that was the time of the great upwelling in loan words in English. But can we expect it to be written again a century hence, when only half as many languages will be available as candidates for borrowing? The World in So Many Words is charmingly written, carefully indexed, and quirkily entertaining. It mediates between the excellent large dictionaries that provide the information and a public eager to seize the moment of excited curiosity. Richard W. Bailey The University ofMichigan References Barnhart, David K, and Allan A. Metcalf. 1997. American in So Many Words: Words that Have Shaped America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Crystal, David. 2000. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. The New Oxford Dictionary ofEnglish on CD-ROM. 2000. Oxford: Oxford UP. The Oxford English Dictionary. 1933. Ed. James A. H. Murray and others. 13 volumes . Oxford: Clarendon Press. ...