[the notes from the book were retrieved with kobogarden, with the purpose of aiding to create a map of the ideas the book left me. The full list of book highlights can be found here. I'm still in the process of reading.]

At some point during my learning of Greek, I realised Greek, English and Portuguese are not total strangers; and so, how exactly do languages vary, be it in etymology, straight formal structures, or any other criteria I might not even know about? This book is a very informal take on linguistics, with twenty different chapters, each dedicated to a language — and they're sorted by the size of speaking population (thus, Portuguese fares quite highly in that list).

The first chapter, dedicated to Vietnamese, had already a quite thorough account of the author's experience with learning Vietnamese, with details of difficulties, and even the idea of European languages as mere dialects of each other. He later delves into Korean, which brings along some ideas on ideophones (exhibit 1, exhibit 2 and exhibit 3); then there's Tamil and Krama — the first holy, the latter oppresive (oh, how interesting the world of languages!), and Turkish, with some context on its committee for language transformation (which proved, against widespread belief, that it is possible to have a strong influence on the shaping of a language, even though it problematic repercussions in the underlying logic of, in this case, word suffixes).