One of the questions publishers routinely ask is, ‘What is the intended audience for your book?’ Some authors might be tempted to answer, ‘Anyone who is interested’. In the volume under review, Coulter George serves up a treat for the interested. The book is modestly priced and so ought to attract a wide readership. He says that it is not for specialists (8) but does an excellent job of presenting a great deal of technical information in a transparent and digestible manner. Anyone who is trained in general linguistics and comparative philology will admire the way the material has been made accessible to the uninitiated; the uninitiated, by contrast, need have no fear that they will come away blinded by linguistic science.

After an introduction canvassing some general ideas about what makes languages different, including a brief glance at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that our thoughts are shaped by the languages we use, George presents six substantive chapters looking in detail at Greek, Latin, Old English and the Germanic languages, Sanskrit, Old Irish and the Celtic languages, and Hebrew. He chose these because ‘they have particular cultural resonance for the average anglophone’ (213). Those who would have liked Ancient Egyptian, or Mayan or Chinese are pointed to discussions by specialists elsewhere.

George’s approach involves dwelling in detail on the sound inventory of the languages he studies. It is pointless to ask, ‘Why does Greek sound different from Irish?’, because at some level we just have to accept that early hominins went their own way as they developed speech; but, that limitation being set to one side, George gives a good historical account of how the various Indo-European languages under discussion diverged phonetically from the reconstructed parent language known as Proto-Indo-European. His discussion of Grimm’s Laws and the umlaut in the Germanic context (100–07) is masterly. There is a brilliantly concise explanation of the fate of inherited diphthongs in Sanskrit (136–38). Because George does not discuss the Sanskrit verb itself, there is no discussion of the phenomena of guna and vrddhi. This might have been helpful to those who go on to study the language, enabling them to understand the morphological feature of stem gradation in terms of the broader historical phonology. There is a brief discussion of the phenomenon of assimilatory retroflexion (138–39). It might have been helpful just to name the so-called ruki and nati rules, which deal with assimilation of different sounds over different domains.

When sounds have been dealt with, George looks at features of morphology and syntax that seem to him peculiar to the language under discussion. In the context of Greek, he introduces the reader to the sheer richness of the verbal paradigm while making important points about the difference between tense and aspect (22–27). For both Greek (18–22) and Latin (59–67, 82–88), he explains how the inflexional system allows an economy of words and a freedom in their ordering within the sentence, without losing sight of the fact that, even given the potential for such latitude, there are certain orderings of subject, verb and object that seem to be normative in different languages (167).

George does not leave things at the level of general description. For each language that he discusses, he takes a passage and draws out in detail, in transliteration (where necessary) and translation, the features that are peculiar to and typical of that language. His discussion of those Hebrew verb forms characterized by prefixed waw explains the extraordinary preponderance of sentences beginning with ‘and’ in the King James Bible (200–02). Beneath the English ‘and it came to pass, when they were in the field’ (Genesis 4:8) is shown to lie a typical Hebrew construction involving the waw-consecutive of the imperfect verb ‘to be’ followed by an infinitive with personal suffixes: ‘and-it-was in-being-their in-the-field’ (203).

Following in the footsteps of Calvert Watkins and others, George’s analysis of a passage of the Sanskrit Rig Veda (148–56) is especially rich and uncovers traces of the ancient poetic traditions of the Indo-European peoples before they split into separate groups.

George invokes dead languages in the title of his book, but he has plenty to say about modern languages, the Romance languages, modern German and modern Irish in particular. This material is always used to explain the end point of processes identified in earlier phases of the language. On his own showing, there is nothing dead about these languages. Plenty of people are studying them and George’s book is a delightful protreptic to future generations to do likewise.