What book(s) might you recommend for linguistics in general?
Phoebe
semesters of Japanese in university (which also needs refreshing badly)
I would like to learn several languages if possible, some possible choices
may be Russian (I have a friend whose first language is Russian, but her
English is fluent enough with no accent that you wouldn't know), Mandarin
(lots of Chinese people live in my part of the world, western Canada),
Spanish (easy enough to find speakers, especially if you go south), and
maybe Arabic (seems like an interesting idea, it's exotic. Also I noticed
that it would cover the rest of the 'official languages of the UN' if that
means anything)
What I might find useful is a book that isn't too centred around one
particular language or even a category of them, which teaches about
linguistics in general. Something that might make a good textbook for a low
level university course, perhaps. Does anyone have any recommendations,
either for the book, or for which languages I might want to focus on. It
would pretty much be mostly self study (self study is how I usually learn
best at other subjects) and I would eventually go into chatrooms which speak
the language (I've tried French ones before, and I can follow some of what's
going on but I look through the dictionary a lot, so I need practice), and
any speaking/listening practice I can get from local speakers. I may also
look into finding Pimsleur tapes at the library or something like that
I think I'd find it interesting to learn different types, like one that is
very synthetic, and one that is very analytical, etc. I thought of Finnish
for the synthetic category but I am under the impression that Russian works
that way too (not to mention Japanese)
I would like to, as a minimum, be able to read novels in whatever language I
may learn, and be able to appreciate at least most of what is being offered
in them
Neeraj Mathur
"Phoebe" <n...@nospam.net> wrote in message
news:%t%xe.105617$9A2.41306@edtnps89...
> What I might find useful is a book that isn't too centred around one
> particular language or even a category of them, which teaches about
> linguistics in general. Something that might make a good textbook for a
> low level university course, perhaps. Does anyone have any
> recommendations, either for the book, or for which languages I might want
> to focus on. It would pretty much be mostly self study (self study is how
> I usually learn best at other subjects) and I would eventually go into
> chatrooms which speak the language (I've tried French ones before, and I
> can follow some of what's going on but I look through the dictionary a
> lot, so I need practice), and any speaking/listening practice I can get
> from local speakers. I may also look into finding Pimsleur tapes at the
> library or something like that
Hi Phoebe,
I think it's important to keep in mind that learning languages and learning
linguistics are two very separate and distinct pursuits and goals. What
interests you about linguistics, or what field or branch of linguistics are
you most drawn to? In my experience, most texts on linguistics tend to deal
either with Chomsky or post-Chomsky grammar and theoretical linguistics;
most of their methods, of course, work best for English and draw the bulk of
their examples from that field. Otherwise, you might find yourself
interested in a very different field, like historical linguistics for
instance, in which case the introductory texts will be very different indeed
(and have virtually no overlap).
First-year North American linguistics courses tend to focus on
transformational grammar and things like that. For that sort of text, I
would recommend some of the textbooks edited by Victoria Fromkin. There are
a few; browse your local bookstore or library.
A smaller, shorter and much more manageable introduction can be found in
Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson's fantastic work _Modern Linguistics: The
Results of Chomsky's Revolution_. I really, really like this book and highly
recommend it, especially if you've never studied any linguistics before and
aren't sure whether a large and thorough textbook is the best investment.
Look for it in libraries (it's probably out of print).
An interesting approach to descriptive linguistics can be found in Marianne
Mithun's _The Languages of Native North America_ in the Cambridge Language
Surveys series. While the book is, of course, focussed on providing a
description of the languages of Native North America, the book is filled
with all kinds of very useful information aimed at introducing concepts of
descriptive linguistics in general. A very eye-opening book, and a favourite
of some well-known academics.
Now, for your other question of which language to learn. Given your
background in French and Japanese, your goal to be able to read novels, and
your location in Western Canada, my advice would be to study Spanish first.
The prime reason for this is that the language will be a quick study for
you. Most English-speakers find Spanish particularly easy for them to learn,
and there are plenty of excellent learning materials available to you.
Therefore, the biggest advantage of studying Spanish will be that you will
be able to learn how you learn languages - what techniques and methods work
best for you and how you need to spend your time and resources to ensure
success. You will then be able to take these transferable skills to the
study of languages that most people find harder, such as Cantonese, Russian,
or Arabic.
The most important thing, however, is to study a language that you feel
particularly motivated to learn. If the language for which your motivation
is greatest is not Spanish, ignore the above paragraph and study it
instead - motivation counts for much, much more than any other factor once
you get past the honeymoon phase of learning a new language and try to move
into the position where you can read a novel or follow a movie with some
fluency. Your message sounded a bit unfocussed in this regard - it sounds as
though you are more interested in being a polyglot than in mastering any
particular tongue. I would recomend setting yourself some kind of goal -
since you mentioned novels, for instance, I might pick a novel you know
really well and really enjoy in the target language and work towards the
stage where you can enjoy it. Whatever that goal is should be able to keep
you motivated enough as you wade through the language. For instance, my goal
in learning Latin was Ovid's Metamorphoses - I loved it in translation, and
adored the text through high school; last term I was able to finally savour
the delights of fulfilling something I'd promised myself when I read through
it in Latin. There was something similar when I read Pablo Neruda in
Spanish, the Bacchae in Greek and the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. On the
other hand, the failure to set myself a particular goal I was completely
devoetd to is probably the biggest reason that I have not yet mastered
German (I know the grammar structures but have virtually no vocabulary),
Arabic, Welsh, Farsi, Russian or any of the other languages I've embarked
upon at various times. Motivation is the key to getting from the stage where
you know your way around the grammar of a language and actually know the
language.
Good luck!
Neeraj Mathur
jimbo...@gmail.com
pretend that I like it myself but it's god relatively good if low level
coverage. It's a very popular first year general linguistics text.
An Introduction to Language
Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams
publisher: Heinle
015508481X
Peter T. Daniels
> Hi Phoebe,
>
> I think it's important to keep in mind that learning languages and learning
> linguistics are two very separate and distinct pursuits and goals. What
> interests you about linguistics, or what field or branch of linguistics are
> you most drawn to? In my experience, most texts on linguistics tend to deal
> either with Chomsky or post-Chomsky grammar and theoretical linguistics;
> most of their methods, of course, work best for English and draw the bulk of
> their examples from that field. Otherwise, you might find yourself
> interested in a very different field, like historical linguistics for
> instance, in which case the introductory texts will be very different indeed
> (and have virtually no overlap).
>
> First-year North American linguistics courses tend to focus on
> transformational grammar and things like that. For that sort of text, I
> would recommend some of the textbooks edited by Victoria Fromkin. There are
> a few; browse your local bookstore or library.
I couldn't disagree more! Fromkin & Rodman, now in its 6th or 7th
edition, is the worst intro ling textbook I've seen -- I suspect its
popularity (mentioned by "jimbo") is due to its simplistic approach and
to its use of cartoons.
The best textbook (IMnsHO) is O'Grady et al.'s, which is Canadian, and
its American edition by Aronoff et al. (I think the 4th ed. of the
latter has just come out.)
> A smaller, shorter and much more manageable introduction can be found in
> Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson's fantastic work _Modern Linguistics: The
> Results of Chomsky's Revolution_. I really, really like this book and highly
> recommend it, especially if you've never studied any linguistics before and
> aren't sure whether a large and thorough textbook is the best investment.
> Look for it in libraries (it's probably out of print).
Utterly worthless, since it's explicitly only about Chomsky -- the
Chomsky of many decades ago.
> An interesting approach to descriptive linguistics can be found in Marianne
> Mithun's _The Languages of Native North America_ in the Cambridge Language
> Surveys series. While the book is, of course, focussed on providing a
> description of the languages of Native North America, the book is filled
> with all kinds of very useful information aimed at introducing concepts of
> descriptive linguistics in general. A very eye-opening book, and a favourite
> of some well-known academics.
Unreadable. Purely for reference. Certainly not intended or suited for a
beginner! And, her interests aren't in Native American languages.
My recommendations for someone first coming to linguistics are the
following:
Ronald Macaulay, *The Social Art* (lousy title, excellent book): the
function of language in society
Guy Deutscher, *The Unfolding of Language* (brand new): the history of
language (without speculation on language origin)
P. H. Matthews's *Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction* (in the Oxford
series) is mistitled -- it should be *Language: A VSI* -- but like
everything he does is clear and elegant (and very short).
David Crystal, *Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language*
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Tommi Nieminen
> I couldn't disagree more! Fromkin & Rodman, now in its 6th or 7th
> edition, is the worst intro ling textbook I've seen -- I suspect its
> popularity (mentioned by "jimbo") is due to its simplistic approach and
> to its use of cartoons.
It has a Chomskian bias and so on, but I've always found it extremely
readable. I at least remain unscathed even though it was one of the
first non-Finnish linguistics books I've read. (One of its editions,
third or fourth I guess.) Of course, I'm slightly predisposed towards
the late Fromkin, since she also practised phonetics :-)
> The best textbook (IMnsHO) is O'Grady et al.'s, which is Canadian,
You mean the thick and heavy Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction,
whose fourth edition came out a year or so ago? I only perused the
psycholinguistics section, and I think I sensed the distinct smell of
Chomsky there. But maybe I'm just paranoid...
What about Jean Aitchison's Linguistics: An Introduction? An easy reader
that gives sufficient scope of the whole field for the newcomer. Latest
edition I have is from 1999.
Even better would be Per Linell's Människans sprĺk (roughly, 'human
language'), but unfortunately not only has it never been translated from
Swedish to any other language, but Linell himself has given up
linguistics altogether and practices a field more or less of his own
design with has a weird name I always tend to forget. The book is from
1982, so it's somewhat past its best-before date too.
John Lyons's mammoth books (Theoretical Linguistics and so on) have the
same problem--they haven't been updated lately AFAIK.
--
.... Tommi Nieminen .... http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tommni/ ....
Csak füvön élt a kis zebra,
de most rákapott a zabra;
végül is elvitték Szobra,
ott oktatják szebbre-jobbra.
-Devecseri Gábor-
.... tommi dot nieminen at campus dot jyu dot fi ....
Neeraj Mathur
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:42C93B...@worldnet.att.net...
> Neeraj Mathur wrote:
>> First-year North American linguistics courses tend to focus on
>> transformational grammar and things like that. For that sort of text, I
>> would recommend some of the textbooks edited by Victoria Fromkin. There
>> are
>> a few; browse your local bookstore or library.
>
> I couldn't disagree more! Fromkin & Rodman, now in its 6th or 7th
> edition, is the worst intro ling textbook I've seen -- I suspect its
> popularity (mentioned by "jimbo") is due to its simplistic approach and
> to its use of cartoons.
Fromkin and Rodman I have never used, although I've heard much about it. The
Fromkin book I was thinking of was _Linguistics: An Introduction to
Linguistic Theory_ (Blackwell, 2000). What do you think of that one?
>> A smaller, shorter and much more manageable introduction can be found in
>> Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson's fantastic work _Modern Linguistics: The
>> Results of Chomsky's Revolution_. I really, really like this book and
>> highly
>> recommend it, especially if you've never studied any linguistics before
>> and
>> aren't sure whether a large and thorough textbook is the best investment.
>> Look for it in libraries (it's probably out of print).
>
> Utterly worthless, since it's explicitly only about Chomsky -- the
> Chomsky of many decades ago.
True, but the interest in the book is not in the conclusions but in the
method and examples, which are very thought-provoking.
Neeraj Mathur
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels kirjoitti:
>
> > I couldn't disagree more! Fromkin & Rodman, now in its 6th or 7th
> > edition, is the worst intro ling textbook I've seen -- I suspect its
> > popularity (mentioned by "jimbo") is due to its simplistic approach and
> > to its use of cartoons.
>
> It has a Chomskian bias and so on, but I've always found it extremely
> readable. I at least remain unscathed even though it was one of the
> first non-Finnish linguistics books I've read. (One of its editions,
> third or fourth I guess.) Of course, I'm slightly predisposed towards
> the late Fromkin, since she also practised phonetics :-)
>
> > The best textbook (IMnsHO) is O'Grady et al.'s, which is Canadian,
>
> You mean the thick and heavy Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction,
> whose fourth edition came out a year or so ago? I only perused the
> psycholinguistics section, and I think I sensed the distinct smell of
> Chomsky there. But maybe I'm just paranoid...
Are you looking at the original or the American edition? Bill O'Grady
himself is definitely not a Chomskyan, though presumably he invited
contributors who could present that point of view; Mark Aronoff is a
Chomsky student, albeit an iconoclastic one (he was the one who got to
introduce morphology into Chomskyism).
Also, the student isn't expected to do all the chapters; they're there
so the instructor can build the course s/he wants to teach.
> What about Jean Aitchison's Linguistics: An Introduction? An easy reader
> that gives sufficient scope of the whole field for the newcomer. Latest
> edition I have is from 1999.
Haven't seen it -- maybe it isn't available here.
> Even better would be Per Linell's Människans språk (roughly, 'human
> language'), but unfortunately not only has it never been translated from
> Swedish to any other language, but Linell himself has given up
> linguistics altogether and practices a field more or less of his own
> design with has a weird name I always tend to forget. The book is from
> 1982, so it's somewhat past its best-before date too.
I have one thing of Linell's on Indo-European (translated). Strange it
is.
> John Lyons's mammoth books (Theoretical Linguistics and so on) have the
> same problem--they haven't been updated lately AFAIK.
Not ever, AFAIK, And _very_ heavy going -- for me as an undergraduate
around 1970.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> news:42C93B...@worldnet.att.net...
> > Neeraj Mathur wrote:
> >> First-year North American linguistics courses tend to focus on
> >> transformational grammar and things like that. For that sort of text, I
> >> would recommend some of the textbooks edited by Victoria Fromkin. There
> >> are
> >> a few; browse your local bookstore or library.
> >
> > I couldn't disagree more! Fromkin & Rodman, now in its 6th or 7th
> > edition, is the worst intro ling textbook I've seen -- I suspect its
> > popularity (mentioned by "jimbo") is due to its simplistic approach and
> > to its use of cartoons.
>
> Fromkin and Rodman I have never used, although I've heard much about it. The
> Fromkin book I was thinking of was _Linguistics: An Introduction to
> Linguistic Theory_ (Blackwell, 2000). What do you think of that one?
Never heard of it. Why would she have done something that would compete
with her other very successful work?
> >> A smaller, shorter and much more manageable introduction can be found in
> >> Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson's fantastic work _Modern Linguistics: The
> >> Results of Chomsky's Revolution_. I really, really like this book and
> >> highly
> >> recommend it, especially if you've never studied any linguistics before
> >> and
> >> aren't sure whether a large and thorough textbook is the best investment.
> >> Look for it in libraries (it's probably out of print).
> >
> > Utterly worthless, since it's explicitly only about Chomsky -- the
> > Chomsky of many decades ago.
>
> True, but the interest in the book is not in the conclusions but in the
> method and examples, which are very thought-provoking.
But Phoebe was asking for a basic introduction to linguistics!
I _think_ that's the book I reviewed for Library Journal (which makes it
between 1976 and 1979 or so) with the opening sentence "This is the best
introduction, not to modern linguistics, but to Chomsky's approach ...";
deliberately phrased so it could be excerpted as "the best introduction
... to Chomsky's approach--Library Journal" -- which indeed they did do
in an advertisement shortly thereafter.
Helmut Richter
> P. H. Matthews's *Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction* (in the Oxford
> series) is mistitled -- it should be *Language: A VSI* -- but like
> everything he does is clear and elegant (and very short).
Now, as you make the fine distinction between talking about "language"
as distinct from "linguistics" ...
> David Crystal, *Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language*
... is the latter a book on "language" or on "linguistics", according
to your criteria?
Now, Phoebe's question focussed very much on languages and not so much
on linguistics. Thus, *her* needs might be better served with a book
dealing with several languages having different characteristics. Books
on many languages (such as Dalby's) tend to give lots of language
names but little about the languages.
A nice book in this respect--albeit out of print and not in
English--is the "Fischer-Lexikon Sprachen" (Fischer (the publisher)
encyclopedia: Languages). They describe only about 20 languages with
an example text which is translated as literally as possible with a
subsequent explanation of the grammar on a few pages: of course not
comprehensive but with enough hints to understand many of the grammar
features in the example text.
I do not know whether something similar exists in English.
Helmut Richter
Tommi Nieminen
>>> The best textbook (IMnsHO) is O'Grady et al.'s, which is Canadian,
>>
>> You mean the thick and heavy Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction,
>> whose fourth edition came out a year or so ago? I only perused the
>> psycholinguistics section, and I think I sensed the distinct smell of
>> Chomsky there. But maybe I'm just paranoid...
>
> Are you looking at the original or the American edition?
How can I say? My copy is the third edition from 1996, published by
Pearson Education (of the Longman group) and printed in England. The
section on psycholinguistics I mentioned is written by Gary Libben
(don't know him).
BTW, the Chomskian flavour I perceived in the book may also have
something to do with one of the co-editors, Francis Katamba. I used his
introductory book on phonology when I lectured on that subject for the
very first time (eight years ago--how the time flies!), and I recall he
seemed very emphatic on GP being the one phonological theory worthy of
mention.
>> What about Jean Aitchison's Linguistics: An Introduction?
...
> Haven't seen it -- maybe it isn't available here.
Shame. Aitchison writes well and broadly, although she never seems to go
very deep. (I was thoroughly disappointed on The Seeds of Speech. The
evolution of language is what I'd call a hobby of mine, but I cannot
stand Bickerton, Pinker and the rest of them.)
> I have one thing of Linell's on Indo-European (translated). Strange it
> is.
:-) Okay, even when a linguist, Linell was perhaps never strictly in
the mainstream. His most important book by far is Psychological Reality
in Phonology (Cambridge UP 1979) which is principally on the question of
argumentation and evidence in phonology (not only psychological reality
but empirical argumentation as well). Anyone interested in questions of
argumentation in linguistics should read it.
--
... Tommi Nieminen ... http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tommni/ ...
O Gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!
-John Dryden-
... tommi dot nieminen at campus dot jyvaskyla dot fi ...
Brian M. Scott
<tommiDOT...@campus.jyu.fi.invalid> wrote in
<news:dleye.1823$XQ....@reader1.news.jippii.net> in
sci.lang:
[...]
> (I was thoroughly disappointed on The Seeds of Speech. The
> evolution of language is what I'd call a hobby of mine, but I cannot
> stand Bickerton, Pinker and the rest of them.)
What do you think of Carstairs-McCarthy?
[...]
Brian
Tommi Nieminen
> What do you think of Carstairs-McCarthy?
"Origins of Complex Language"? Haven't seen it but now that I checked,
they seem to have in the U of Helsinki library. Only earlier today I
visited there... pfft. You should've mentioned that earlier!
My favourites have been the article collections they make after the
Evolution of language conferences. -- I was supposed to have at least
two of them, but now that I glanced through my bookshelf I saw only one
(Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & James R. Hurford, eds., The
Evolutionary Emergence of Language, Cambridge UP 2000). Hope I haven't
inadvertently donated the other book to the U of Tampere Finnish
department :-)
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
<news:42C93B...@worldnet.att.net> in sci.lang:
[...]
> Guy Deutscher, *The Unfolding of Language* (brand new):
> the history of language (without speculation on language
> origin)
Just picked this one up recently; it really is a gem.
[...]
Brian
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels:
>
> > P. H. Matthews's *Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction* (in the Oxford
> > series) is mistitled -- it should be *Language: A VSI* -- but like
> > everything he does is clear and elegant (and very short).
>
> Now, as you make the fine distinction between talking about "language"
> as distinct from "linguistics" ...
>
> > David Crystal, *Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language*
>
> ... is the latter a book on "language" or on "linguistics", according
> to your criteria?
Language.
> Now, Phoebe's question focussed very much on languages and not so much
> on linguistics. Thus, *her* needs might be better served with a book
> dealing with several languages having different characteristics. Books
> on many languages (such as Dalby's) tend to give lots of language
> names but little about the languages.
The best remains Comrie's World's Major Languages.
> A nice book in this respect--albeit out of print and not in
> English--is the "Fischer-Lexikon Sprachen" (Fischer (the publisher)
> encyclopedia: Languages). They describe only about 20 languages with
> an example text which is translated as literally as possible with a
> subsequent explanation of the grammar on a few pages: of course not
> comprehensive but with enough hints to understand many of the grammar
> features in the example text.
>
> I do not know whether something similar exists in English.
It does for Semitic! (Bergsträßers *Einführung*, kindly mentioned here a
few days ago.)
Peter T. Daniels
I only would be cautious in his sections (the appendixes) on the
possible origins of Semitic derivational morphology. He doesn't take
into account the Afroasiatic background as carefully as he ought. Note,
though, that the bottom blurb is by my professor, Gene Gragg -- and was
very recent, since it calles him Emeritus.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels kirjoitti:
>
> >>> The best textbook (IMnsHO) is O'Grady et al.'s, which is Canadian,
> >>
> >> You mean the thick and heavy Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction,
> >> whose fourth edition came out a year or so ago? I only perused the
> >> psycholinguistics section, and I think I sensed the distinct smell of
> >> Chomsky there. But maybe I'm just paranoid...
> >
> > Are you looking at the original or the American edition?
>
> How can I say? My copy is the third edition from 1996, published by
> Pearson Education (of the Longman group) and printed in England. The
> section on psycholinguistics I mentioned is written by Gary Libben
> (don't know him).
Maybe it's yet a third version, for Britain. The Preface should give you
the information. The Canadian Languages-of-the-World chapter has great
detail on First Nations languages, the American one, on Native American
languages.
> BTW, the Chomskian flavour I perceived in the book may also have
> something to do with one of the co-editors, Francis Katamba. I used his
> introductory book on phonology when I lectured on that subject for the
> very first time (eight years ago--how the time flies!), and I recall he
> seemed very emphatic on GP being the one phonological theory worthy of
> mention.
There isn't one GP any more -- over here everyone has adopted McCarthy
et al.'s Autosegmental Phonology (a _really_ stupid name, since it's
supposed to relate to "autonomous"), which claims to analyze in terms of
syllables but refuses to give up the level of "segment", and then
switched to the OT bandwagon.
> >> What about Jean Aitchison's Linguistics: An Introduction?
> ...
> > Haven't seen it -- maybe it isn't available here.
>
> Shame. Aitchison writes well and broadly, although she never seems to go
> very deep. (I was thoroughly disappointed on The Seeds of Speech. The
> evolution of language is what I'd call a hobby of mine, but I cannot
> stand Bickerton, Pinker and the rest of them.)
There are several editions of her excellent *Language Change: Progress
or Decay?* -- there's another good title for Phoebe, if she's still
following this thread -- and I think she also did Teach Yourself
Linguistics.
I wrote to her once under the impression that she was the library
scientist of the same name, and she replied that she isn't but that she
found my article on library classifications of language and linguistics
interesting nonetheless.
> > I have one thing of Linell's on Indo-European (translated). Strange it
> > is.
>
> :-) Okay, even when a linguist, Linell was perhaps never strictly in
> the mainstream. His most important book by far is Psychological Reality
> in Phonology (Cambridge UP 1979) which is principally on the question of
> argumentation and evidence in phonology (not only psychological reality
> but empirical argumentation as well). Anyone interested in questions of
> argumentation in linguistics should read it.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
pit...@gmail.com
<http://print.google.com/print?id=VqjaRmDPvPgC&lpg=3&prev=http://print.google.com/print%3Fq%3Dfoundations%2Bof%2Blanguage%26oi%3Dprint&sig=pSY7LzU5tR2btPCemcC0A8Aj-GI>.
The best introductions to broadly understood linguistics I've read.
You will not find there much about specific languages though.
Best,
--
Grzegorz
Peter T. Daniels
>
> I would recommend Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language (2002)
> http://print.google.com/print?id=VqjaRmDPvPgC&lpg=3&prev=http://print.google.com/print%3Fq%3Dfoundations%2Bof%2Blanguage%26oi%3Dprint&sig=pSY7LzU5tR2btPCemcC0A8Aj-G
> You will not find there much about specific languages though.
Absolutely incomprehensible to someone who is not familiar with both
general linguistics and Chomskyism.
Grzegorz Chrupala
Surely it can do no harm to have some familiarity with those fields in
reading the book but I had the idea that it certainly was quite
comprehensible for people from other fields. Actually Jackendoff says
in the preface (page xii) that he had three concentric rings of
audience in mind in writing the book, i.e. (i) linguists, (ii)
psycho/socio/computational linguists and also (iii) others with an
interest in language. I suspect the book suceeds in appealing to all
three, although that is of course neither for me or for you to judge,
as we both are, I assume, quite familiar with linguistics.
Best,
--
Grzegorz
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > pit...@gmail.com wrote:
> > >
> > > I would recommend Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language (2002)
> http://print.google.com/print?id=VqjaRmDPvPgC&lpg=3&prev=http://print.google.com/print%3Fq%3Dfoundations%2Bof%2Blanguage%26oi%3Dprint&sig=pSY7LzU5tR2btPCemcC0A
> > > You will not find there much about specific languages though.
> >
> > Absolutely incomprehensible to someone who is not familiar with both
> > general linguistics and Chomskyism.
>
> Surely it can do no harm to have some familiarity with those fields in
> reading the book but I had the idea that it certainly was quite
> comprehensible for people from other fields. Actually Jackendoff says
> in the preface (page xii) that he had three concentric rings of
> audience in mind in writing the book, i.e. (i) linguists, (ii)
> psycho/socio/computational linguists and also (iii) others with an
He correctly recognizes that (ii) is distinct from (i).
> interest in language. I suspect the book suceeds in appealing to all
> three, although that is of course neither for me or for you to judge,
> as we both are, I assume, quite familiar with linguistics.
But I'm also familiar with what nonlinguists aren't familiar with ...
maybe you've been reading technical stuff for so long that you don't
recognize what's familiar to outsiders and what isn't. I happen to like
Jackendoff's book a lot, but I wouldn't ask a nonlinguist to read it!
Phoebe
and compile a list when I have time, and see what I can find
The question came up about language versus linguistics as a seperate topic,
and I wasn't really thinking of it that way. By linguistics I suppose I
meant a kind of catalog of typical language features and what to look for,
mostly meant as a way to help in the actual goal of learning different
languages. I find that I tend to learn things better when I have a structure
to follow. Kind of like how it's a lot easier to learn C++ if you already
understand concepts of object oriented programming. I like the lists in the
backs of translation dictionaries that show the ways to inflect verbs and so
on, but they have names like 'perfunctive' or 'genitive' etc that don't
really mean much to most people. It's a lot easier for me to remember things
if I know why they are the way that they are
Peter T. Daniels
Then you want to look at the "historical linguistics" of each language
family you're interested in. For the Romance languages, there are
several books along the lines of "From Latin to French," "From Latin to
Portuguese," etc. (I can't give you names), mostly from the 1950s, that
take you step by step.
And the "Great Languages" series originally published by Faber & Faber
might be of interest, though they do get pretty technical. Unfortunately
not all the volumes that were planned got published, but there are
Romance, French, Latin, Spanish & Portuguese, Italian, Russian & Slavic,
Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese.
Neeraj Mathur
> The question came up about language versus linguistics as a seperate topic,
> and I wasn't really thinking of it that way. By linguistics I suppose I
> meant a kind of catalog of typical language features and what to look for,
> mostly meant as a way to help in the actual goal of learning different
> languages. I find that I tend to learn things better when I have a structure
> to follow. Kind of like how it's a lot easier to learn C++ if you already
> understand concepts of object oriented programming. I like the lists in the
> backs of translation dictionaries that show the ways to inflect verbs and so
> on, but they have names like 'perfunctive' or 'genitive' etc that don't
> really mean much to most people. It's a lot easier for me to remember things
> if I know why they are the way that they are
Hi Phoebe,
It seems then that most of the books that were recommended are of
virtually no use to you; you can probably safely ignore the lot of them.
The issue here is that 'typical language features' are of little use in
learning languages (though of much use in describing them
linguistically) since each feature within a language gets its meaning
from the other features available.
Take something simple like 'genitive'. If you learned Latin, you might
start to think that a genitive is pretty simply a possessive case,
equivalent to the English <'s> or the preposition 'of'. Then you learn
Greek. Suddenly the genitive does many more things than that. Now have a
look at Sanskrit, and it's clear that possession is just a very small
portion of what this case can do; some of what it's doing is like a
Latin dative, yet it has its own dative as well; what in Latin is called
an ablative has functions taken over by three different cases in
Sanskrit and the case called ablative in Sanskrit in fact does not match
up to any use of Latin ablatives without prepositions, and so on. Or a
Sanskrit optative, which has that name solely because of the fact that
to historical linguists it matches the morphology of the Greek optative
(which has its Latin morphological equivalent in the subjunctive; the
Greek subjunctive actually matches some Latin futures and a classical
Sanskrit imperative - total mess).
The point is that for each language, the terminology must be learned for
its own terms only. You have to start fresh each time. There is some
degree of overlap if the languages you learn are all in the same family
- thus Sanskrit, Greek and Latin share many categories and descriptive
methods by virtue of being so closely related to one another - but this
evaporates when dealing with a different language family. Of the
languages you mentioned in your first post - Russian, Mandarin, Spanish
and Arabic - only Russian and Spanish are in the same family, and they
are not particularly closely related to one another within that family
(Spanish is Romance, Russian is Slavic; their similarities would be more
evident in the generation above, comparing Latin and something like Old
Church Slavonic).
In this situation, I don't think that studying 'linguistics in general'
will be a profitable expenditure of time. You'd do much better focussing
on which language you are most motivated to learn and then learning it
fully. You'll learn the categories and terminology appropriate for that
language; these may or may not help you in learning the next, but you'll
have learned how to learn language, which is the most helpful thing.
I haven't really dealt with your C++ analogy. The fact is that the
analogy isn't that appropriate, because languages that are so diverse as
the set you mentioned won't necessarily approach the problem of
communicating a thought in the same way. So you can learn all about
relative clauses, consecutive clauses, verbal morphology and so on for
one language and then find that the next language approaches the problem
in a completely different way.
Take something like comparison. In older Indo-European languages,
comparison is often accomplished by endings on adjectives or adverbs,
and there are three degrees: the simple, the comparative, and the
superlative. So in English you get a set like 'big, bigger, biggest'.
However, an Indo-European language like Spanish doesn't work like that.
The comparative degree is expressed with 'más', and the superlative with
'lo más', so you have 'grande, más grande, lo más grande'. Another
Indo-European language, Hindi, works in a completely different way
altogether from both of these. Even the categories no longer apply;
there is certainly no morphology to correspond. In Hindi, comparison is
not an essential part of learning adjectives; there is no word
corresponding to 'bigger' or 'más grande'; comparison is achieved rather
by a syntactic device with a clause and uses a postposition. To say 'X
is bigger than Y' in Hindi, you come out with a clause something like
'from Y, X is big'. The superlative degree doesn't really exist, other
than if in the above you let Y = 'everything': 'from everthing, X is
big' or 'out of the three, X is big'. My point is that something like
'comparison' has no basic, general description which can be useful even
for learning something like Indo-European languages, which have
developed at least three different strategies for dealing with that issue.
So really, given what you meant when you said 'linguistics', I would
recommend that you skip the books that were recommended by me and others
and just focus on learning your selected languages. Try to focus on one
at a time, and make sure you can get yourself strongly motivated to
actually follow through with the language learning. The process of
learning will tell you what is appropriate for that language.
By the way, I just realised on re-reading that you had suggested that
Mandarin would be a good choice because of lots of Chinese people in
Western Canada. You might want to be careful here. Most of the Chinese
communities in Canada, and certainly the largest groups in Vancouver,
are Cantonese speakers. You might find Mandarin then a bit frustrating,
with not as many people around to help you practise as you expected.
Good luck!
Neeraj Mathur