Prior to his recent retirement, Kenneth Katzner worked for the US government and also served as an editor on a number of international encyclopedias and English dictionaries. He is also author of a large English-Russian/Russian-English Dictionary.
Concise facts and figures on the main families of the world's many thousands of languages are followed by short extracts from 200 of those most widely used. The passages, accompanied by notes on each language's main characteristics, range from 'the verses of Vermana', written in the decorative script of Telugu, a language of the state of Andhra Pradesh in southeast India, to part of the Sermon on the Mount in Esperanto. The result is a wholly fascinating mini-kaleidoscope indicating the largely diverse variety of the world's main languages and their scripts and of their cultures. (Kirkus UK)