Language made plain

Pretty good for what it was, but this is the first book I didn't finish in about a decade. It's very dry, narrator sounds like Dr.

The mechanics of pronunciation, the history of the alphabet, the changes of language over time, are a few of the topics Burgess discusses in this overview of the functioning of the spoken and written word. Much of the book is written as an encouragement to the reader to learn one or more foreign languages: at one point, Burgess suggests that you have not really read Dante or Goethe if you have not read them in the language in which they wrote their respective works.