Passport to Languages

THE MOTHER TONGUE by Lancelot Hogben. 294 pages. Norton. $7.50.

The word is cat in English. In Danish and Dutch it is kat, in Swedish katt, in German katze, in French chat, in Spanish and Portuguese gato, in Italian gatto, in Russian kot, and in Gaelic cat. Such striking linguistic similarities, which occur profusely throughout the Babel of the world, defy coincidence. They suggest that someone who knows one language need never walk blindfold through the labyrinth of a related tongue.

In fact, the 132 languages of the Indo-European family, among them most of the voices of Europe, flowered from the same ancestral roots. Their surface differences conceal a multitude of bonds, which, once recognized, can ease the monolingual traveler's way through the multilingual maze. This fascinating and infuriating book, by the author of the bestselling Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen, sets out to do just that. "Nowadays," writes Hogben, "neither school nor college courses within the English-speaking part of the world do much to divulge the many clues to word origin which we can get from spelling."

Into the Pot. Only some 5% of the 4,000 languages spoken today have managed the arduous transition to writing --a trip that all but the few that still use ideograms, like Chinese, owe to the Semitic tribes who traded with Athens 27 centuries ago. The Semites had a phonetic script so much more resourceful than the Greeks' own that it was promptly adopted. From Greece this alphabet spread to Rome, and from there Rome's conquering legions took it all over Europe, including England.

There, the mother tongue had already begun its centuries-long elaboration. Successive waves of invaders--the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Norsemen, the Normans--all added new words, constructions and usages to the pot. Beneath the weight of this hybridization, the island's forerunner language, Celtic, vanished almost without a trace.

Hogben's book is full of clues to understanding alien but associated tongues. He urges the amateur linguist to forget the vowels and concentrate on the consonants, those "fossils" in the evolution of any language. The German word Zunge, for instance, might mystify the uninitiated unless he follows Hogben's advice to substitute T for the German Z. Similarly with the Spanish halcon, which leaps into intelligibility with Hogben's advice to trade h for f.

Learning even the rudiments of a foreign language is not that easy, of course. And for all his helpful tips, Author Hogben does not go out of his way to make things any easier. However spirited, his book is an uncompromising lesson in philology that levies a stern and at times extortionate tax on the patience and attention of the reader.

At the end of each chapter, as in Mathematics for the Million, Hogben attaches quizzes for the conscientious reader, who is expected to find English equivalents for endless lists of Latin and Greek words and phrases and to translate from a 1,000-year-old English Gospel ("He dysegath, hwa maeg sinna forgifan buton God ana?"*)--all without any answers from Hogben.

Clyppan & Hit. But even the most casual reader can be repaid by Hogben's excursion through the history, and past the astonishing universality, of the mother tongue. It may be enough just to discover why, from some hillbilly throats, it escapes as hit--that was how the English said it in Chaucer's time. Or that the perfectly good Anglo-Saxon verb clyppan yielded to a Norman import (embracen) and survives in English today only in the humble paper clip.

* He talks foolishly; who can forgive sins except God alone?

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