The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages

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Despite being a bit dated at this stage, it has a modern feel to it due to its practical, no-nonsense approach - Bodmer constantly encourages you to learn short-cuts or heuristics to capitalise on the family resemblances among the different language groups, which many language books fail to do. An excellent contrast between the table manners and the traffic rules of a language guides the presentation. You are going to make mistakes and fall into traps no matter what, so don’t get discouraged by exceptions.

Given that I would never say "I wash" but instead, "I'm washing myself", I lost trust in a lot of what the book said about the "advanced evolution of Anglo-American". Whereas for German, the grammar is insanely difficult to get right, but once you know a word in German, you will be able to understand it when you hear it right away. As such, the book covers Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and German in the Teutonic track and French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian in the Romance track, not to mention plenty of discussion of parent languages like Latin and Old English. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.O livro foi publicado no Brasil, nos anos 60, com o título de O homem e as línguas: guia para o estudioso de idiomas, traduzido e adaptado pelo filólogo brasileiro Aires da Mata Machado Filho, em conjunto com Paulo Rónai e Marcello Marques Magalhães. Part II covers the "hybrid heritage" of English as a language which straddles the Germanic and Romance branches of the Indo-European language tree. This book - not overly dated despite its appearance in 1943 - is refreshingly un-tiresome, as opposed to the myriad of general-readership books on linguistics that strain the readers' patience with pseudo-scientific wordiness. Although I've gone much farther in my study of languages and of linguistics, this book will remain dear to my heart forever. UPDATE: Here are spreadsheets of the Romance Word List, Germanic Word List, and the Greek Roots List from the language museum.

The other, the second part, is the most intelligent discussion yet published of the problems of constructing a synthetic or artificial language. You want a closer, albeit time-consuming, look at the languages surrounding you (and they'll always be "Euro-centric" wherever you live)? The English language is a mongrel, consisting of 29% Norman French vocab grafted onto German grammar, with an incredible 9% of our vocab coming from Greek as well.This last point really shows the assumptions made but not clarified in the first part, namely that learning a language is about memorizing a list of words and "redundancies" in language must be bad. Sidenote: In linguistic circles people love to dig into exceptions and point out when rules break down, which can make learners abandon something incredibly useful for fear of making mistakes.

His argument is that if a person learned the Latin and Greek vocabulary lists and all of the 500 word vocabulary lists of all of the languages he provides that a person could understand and make himself understood anywhere in Europe. I come back to this book year after year to read new chapters and refresh myself on those I've already read.

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As languages are living organisms you will find some words here and there in German, English, Portuguese, etc, which are different nowadays, but by no means turns it into a bad reading experience, on the contrary, we see how the languages are still evolving. It's purely academic in that sense, there's no proper explanation on how to actually go about doing that learning. Anyone who loves learning languages will certainly benefit from his practical advice on how to focus on a combination of important vocabulary and how to triangulate from what you already know into a mastery of virtually every major language in Europe.It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a languages as it is actually used in everyday life. A synthetic international language must wait for adoption upon political and educational conditions which are not yet in sight. Finally, he provides a vocabulary of 500 words for the major Romance languages and for the major Germanic languages. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.