Native Tongues (Charles Berlitz)

Berlitz knows languages, and this book is a collection of interesting facts about languages. Here are a few examples: After discussing various Chinese ideograms, including the one for "horse" and the one for "door," we learn that the symbol for something surprising is a horse in a door. I love knowing that the Latin word for "seagull" means "noise with feathers."  Berlitz includes the worlds most efficient travel dictionary, based on the claim that knowing eight words in 25 languages will allow you to convey most essential ideas to the vast majority of the people in the world. Language tells a lot about a culture (in traditional Chinese, the word for "wife" is "the person inside") and about history (the Russian word for "train station" is just their version of the name of an English train station, Vauxhall, that early Russian railroad engineers admired). I recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about how we talk to each other, and why.