West Slavic reference(s) needed

[marie-lucie]

A friend of mine who is a historian of Eastern Europe told me he had started to learn Polish and was interested in learning more about the history of Polish, Slovak and other non-Russian Western Slavic languages, but that he was frustrated that so much written about Slavic was basically about Russian.  I said I was not familiar with the literature about Slavic languages but would enquire.  Can anyone suggest a suitable reference readable by someone with basic knowledge of linguistics, and NOT written by a Russian author? A description and history of Polish, "preferably by a Pole", would also be a possibility.  This person is a native English speaker but can read French and German. 

Thanks, m-l 

[John Cowan]

marie-lucie scripsit:

> A friend of mine who is a historian of Eastern Europe told me he had
> started to learn Polish and was interested in learning more about the
> history of Polish, Slovak and other non-Russian Western Slavic languages,
> but that he was frustrated that so much written about Slavic was basically
> about Russian.

Here are three things I've found: I haven't read any of them.

1) _The Slavonic Languages_, Comrie and Corbett, eds. (1993). This is
a typical Comrie anthology with one chapter giving an overview of each
major Slavic language, much like his larger anthology _The World's
Major Languages_. Based on how good TWML is, I expect most of the
chapters in this one will be excellent. The languages are Bulgarian,
Macedonian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Czech, Slovak, Upper and Lower
Sorbian, Polish, Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian. Your friend can
just skip the last three chapters, I guess. The intro is on line at
<http://www.academia.edu/746850/The_Slavonic_Languages>; it's probably
more technical than the individual chapters.

2) _The Slavic Languages_, Sussex and Cubberley (2011). This is one of
the green-cover Cambridge Language Surveys, which are usually very good.
It seems to be well-distributed over the West, East, and South Slavic
groups. Probably the initial chapters, "Linguistic evolution, genetic
affiliation, and classification" and "Socio-historical evolution" would be
of most interest, as well perhaps as Chapter 9, "Lexis". The others look
like a very typical comparative grammar and may be too detailed/technical.

3) _The Slavic Languages: Unity in Diversity_, Stankiewicz (1986) is
mostly pretty technical, but if he can get a library copy it might
be worth skimming to see if any of the individual papers in it are
interesting.

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