Lyall's Guide to 25 European Languages: an utterly charming book

The book is divided into five sections, each one having a different page color. The author attempted to categorize the 25 subject languages into "families". For the most part, he succeeded: Romance (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian); Germanic (German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian); Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croat1, Bulgarian). The fourth section combined Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian) and Baltic (Latvian [but called Lettish], Lithuanian). The last section, miscellaneous: Greek, Albanian, Turkish, Arabic and, in a stroke of genius, Esperanto.

Lyall Book Cover

Regardless of the language family, each section is set up identically to the others. Each language in the section has its own page devoted to a Guide to Pronunciation. This is followed by a page of Useful Phrases, for instance: "Good day!", "Excuse me.", "Don't mention it.", even the breezily contemporary "Take care!".

The next two pages Notices: "Danger." (It amuses me that "Take care!" takes the alarming exclamation point, "Danger." a mere calming period.) Other notices: "Keep to the right.", "Bathroom", "Lounge" (ahh, the old Europe), "Smokers", "Spitting" and so forth.2

Next come two pages of numerals, the days of the week and the months of the year.

This is followed by what I believe is the whole point of the book, thirty "sentences" that will cover almost any situation that the European tourist is likely to encounter. Among some of the more piquant:

Each of these has a somewhat rough pronunciation guide. For example, #7 in French: "Bonjour, combien est ceci? C'est trop cher. Je le regrette. Au revoir." Bawng zhoor, kombeeahng ay serssee? Say tro shair. Zher ler rergret. Oh rervwar. In all fairness, though, perhaps I should give the author's French pronunciation guide. The transcription might seem less inept.

The last section, my favorite, consists of forty pages of single vocabulary words: "aeroplane, the", "carburettor [sic], the", "methylated spirits, the" , "sleep, to", "wireless, the", and so forth.

Lyall Book inside

1 The author consistently cites Serbian over Croatian vocabulary: 'hleb' instead of 'kruh', and pronunciation: ekavian instead of ijekavian: 'sreda', not 'srijeda' ('Wednesday').

2 The author helpfully sets this section in Cyrillic for the three Slavic languages using that alphabet. The Serbo-Croat notices are set in Roman, however, though the forms are Serbian, not Croatian, which uses the Roman alphabet.