This translation has not yet been checked by a native speaker. If something reads wrong, tell me — a book about languages cannot afford approximations. Report a mistake
The wager
A language is not a code. It is a way of carving up the world.
Some things one language says in a single word, while another needs a whole sentence to work around them. Russian has a name for grief without a cause. Latin does without articles. Creole rebuilt an entire grammar in one generation. Sign language says several things at once, because it has a dimension the others lack.
This book asks each of them the same question: what does this language make thinkable? Then it looks at what its literature has made of that — because writers are the ones who push a language to its limits, where its shape becomes visible.
No prior knowledge needed: every chapter starts from nothing and can be read without knowing a word of the language.
Read the full projectThe chapters
12 languages, {n} chapters
A dead language, a language born of colonisation, a language built from scratch, a language with no known relatives, a language without writing — and the great languages of contact, taken for what cannot be reduced in them.
In every chapter
8 ways in, always the same ones
The structure repeats from one chapter to the next: that is what makes comparison, and therefore understanding, possible.
The script
How it is written, and why that way
Alphabet, syllabary, Chinese characters, or nothing at all. Every system has a history and imposes a way of reading — left to right, right to left, or in space.
The grammatical knot
The thing this language forces you to specify
Every language makes one piece of information compulsory that others leave in the dark: gender, aspect, politeness, the source of what you assert. One chapter per knot.
The untranslatables
The words we borrow because we have no equivalent
Sehnsucht, toska, jeong, sobremesa. Not as a collection of curiosities, but as evidence: these words exist because a culture needed to think them.
The threshold
One text, in the original, explained sentence by sentence
A founding page of each literature, given in its own language, transliterated, translated, then unfolded — so that a reader who knows not one word of the language can see how the text works.
What translation loses
Two or three versions of the same passage, side by side
The best way to see a language is to watch what resists when you try to carry it into another.
False friends and traps
Where resemblance lies
Words that look alike from one language to the next and do not say the same thing: the entertaining part, and the most instructive.
A living voice
One conversation per language
Translators, writers, signers, teachers: people who live inside the language and can say what it is like to move between them.
To begin
Twenty minutes to read your first word
Every chapter ends with an exercise you can actually finish: deciphering a shop sign in Cyrillic, recognising three Chinese radicals, reading one word in Arabic. Not learning the language — stepping through the door.
A glimpse
Every chapter opens on a text
The notebook
The book is being written in the open
A public logbook: what moves forward, what gets stuck, what I change my mind about.
All the entriesTake part
This book needs voices
Each chapter ends with a conversation with someone who lives in the language: a translator, a signer, a teacher, or simply someone who learned it and still remembers where it hurts.
And if you spot a mistake — a loose quotation, a shaky transliteration, a wrong date — say so. A book about languages has no right to be approximate.
Write to the author