Book Review: WORDS TO LOVE A PLANET

Title: Words to Love a Planet: An Illustrated Lexicon of Landscape, People and Possibility

Author: Ella Frances Sanders

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Pages: 233

My GoodReads Rating: 

The book is divided into Seasons, Land, Time, Water, Weather, Home and Being.

The author has also drawn the accompanying illustrations. Each word is supported with information about the kind of word it is (noun, verb etc), its language of origin, pronunciation, etymology, meaning, and the word, as written in the original script.

There are 200 words in all, hailing from several Aboriginal languages, besides Norwegian, English, Old English, German, Japanese, Russian, Sanskrit, French, Ukrainian, Swiss German, Latin, Irish, Finnish, Farsi, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Bahasa Indonesian, Malay, Catalan, Swedish, Cornish, Euskara, Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Malayalam, Orcadian Scots, Lithuanian, Croatian, Scottish Gaelic, Georgian, Telugu, Icelandic, Galician, Scots, Turkish, Shetland, Cantonese, Polish, Egyptian Arabic, Maori and Swahili. Quite a diverse list!

 

WHAT I LIKED:

The aim of this book is commendable: trying to expand the language for talking about the earth. I liked the way the author called our attention to the myriad things around us, slow and gradual, that announce the changing of the seasons.

I believe that civilization and modern development has taken away the words for many of these ephemeral yet deeply significant things. The author reminds us that we are supposed to be tethered to the humming cycle of this planet. She tells us that we are supposed to be reading the seasons the same way we read books, and that colonization has stripped languages of these beautiful words.

The words that she has highlighted for us help us to be more attuned to the tiny shifts around us that have caused the rhythms of the planet to go askew. The research she has done is commendable. I was introduced to concepts I hadn't thought had a name at all, conceptss such as the relief skin feels when exposed to morning sun and leaves falling in a way that suggests letting go is acceptable.

 

Some of the words that stood out for me were:

Solvegg (Norwegian): a sun wall – a great blessing on cold days

Rummescent (English): the smell of leaf decay combined with misty morning

Tulir (Tamil): a bud or new leaf but also thriving in the case of something that started small or from scratch

Kertik (Malay): the sound made by dry leaves and twigs underfoot when walking

Smultronstalle (Swedish): “a wild strawberry spot”, meaning a place or period of time where one feels safe

Oogly (Cornish): how the sky looks when wild, dark, powerful weather is coming

I liked that the author presented words in their original non-Roman scripts. These scripts included Devanagari for Sanskrit, Tamil, Farsi, Greek, Arabic, Malayalam and Telugu. Some of the words contained mentions of other words with similar or related meanings in Korean, Portuguese, Welsh, Uzbek,  Romanian, Mongolian, Hindi, Somali etc.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:
The main introduction was unnecessarily formal and florid.

 

ALL SAID AND DONE:

This was an amazing read. I felt that the limits of my knowledge of the natural world had expanded, thanks to my acquaintance with these words. It’s amazing how so many cultures have multiple names for variations of some aspect for nature. How bereft the English language seems in comparison!

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)