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It's time to celebrate the incredible diversity of languages that is before us from birth and has inspired and fascinated people since they learned to speak. This book opens with the first sounds a baby hears in the womb. Children are able to learn several languages at once. Sophie Gardach shows that this ability has always been an essential and familiar aspect of human behaviour - from the earliest evidence of writing in different languages on Mesopotamian clay tablets to the role of trade in the exchange of words across cultures and continents, beginning with multilingual families of traders.

The author takes us through the "book cemeteries" of medieval synagogues; tells us about the mysteries of hieroglyphics and cuneiform and the long attempts to decipher them; in Britain, she discovers the mysterious lost language of the Cypriot-Minoean scripts; and introduces us to a unique language invented by children in Germany's Pacific colonies.

This is a book about languages and the people who love them. About the strange, wonderful ways people have used languages since the very first records on clay tablets. It is about the language threads that bind us all together. Above all, this book is a sheer pleasure.