The Land of Peoples — The Land of Languages

7 hrs. 31 min.

Popular Science

Language Russian

Author Alexander Kondratov

Narrator Ilya Prudovsky

Description

In all languages, you can find traces of the most ancient history and cultural contacts, of primitive worldviews and the peculiarities of how a given people thinks. Of course, in just one book you can only open the door a little to the fascinating world hidden behind what seem—at first glance—dry and boring pages of dictionaries and grammar.

This book provides a brief overview of the history of the world languages, traces their connections, and shows cultural mutual influences.

Contents:

How many languages are there on the planet?
The history of one family of languages
Discovery in a land of wonders
Chance and necessity
The collapse of a myth
Slavs, Balts, Germans…
Celts, Italic peoples and Romance peoples
From Greece to the Roof of the World
Searching for the “cradle”
The Turkish sea
From the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea
Languages: alive, dead, and dying
In the heart of Asia
Siberia, Turkestan, the Caucasus…
Turks on the Volga…
… and beyond the Danube
The Great Altai
Turks at the pole of cold
A source of wisdom
Mongols, Buryats, Kalmyks
Jurchens, Manchus, Ulichi, Orochs, Oroks, Udege…
The “Indians” of Siberia
Altai unity
On the Kama, on the Ob, on the Danube
Hungarians and Attila
Danube, Volga, Pechora, Ob…
Islands in the Slavic “sea”
The Sayan question
Ural people and Altai people
At the edge of the Oikoumene
Yukaghir fire
Paleo-Asians
Conquerors of the Arctic
A bridge to America
Choson, Sakhalin, and bearded Ainu
Indonesian archipelago
Austronesian triangle
A museum of languages
The Austrian, or southern
Burma, Tibet, the Himalayas
North of the Yangtze
Languages of jungles and deserts
A thousand dialects of Papuans
On the fifth continent
Dark-skinned people in India
Click sounds and mfa
Negroids and paleo-Africans
Zinдж languages
Zinji and Semito-Hamitic peoples
From the Tigris to Gibraltar
The myth of the Hamites
Chadic, Cushitic, Berber…
Signs and sounds of Egyptian texts
King Solomon and Hannibal
Bedouins and Ethiopians
Akkadian dialects
In the Sumerian labyrinth
Elamites, Dravidians, Ubaidians
The secrets of Europe and islands in the mountains
The Caucasus—the “mountain of languages”
How the “mountain of languages” is arranged
Branches and roots
Marr and “Japhetic peoples”
Two Iberias
The Mediterranean before the arrivals
Searching for “missing links”
Is it possible to suspect kinship?
Through the darkness of thousands of years
Nostratic, or Boreal
Basques, Burishi, Caucasians
A miracle of the Yenisei
Two thousand languages of the Americas
An echo across continents
Searching for a proto-language
Epilogue… with a continuation