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

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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. The authors really take this to heart and work towards basic vocabularies analogous to the Word List of Basic English. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. When an accented é precedes t, p, or c at the beginning of a modern French word it often takes the place of the Latin s in English words of Romance origin.

I’m looking forward to someday using the section about working within the Romance and Teutonic languages. There are examples like "I wash" (which means I'm bathing myself in that era) which are used to show how "English has evolved so much further than other European languages" by even being able to remove personal pronouns via the use of context. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.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. It is dominated by the idea that it is easier for a biologist to comprehend and to remember the structures of a number of related animals (when the forms “make sense” developmentally) than to tackle the anatomy, say, of a rabbit in isolation.

Given all the above, I will reiterate that I don't recommend this book at all for any language learners. I recommend it heartily, but with the caveat that one might get more out of it with some time spent with more recent linguistics before diving in. The only annoyance is that the huge tables in Part IV aren't available online somewhere as spreadsheets (the book was written in the '40s) so one could import them into a spaced repetition system like Anki for efficient learning. Its designing is a worthy task for the collaboration of the best minds, but meanwhile what can we do to ease the linguistic strains the next fifty years will put upon the world? He is best remembered for his many books for adults and children that attempted to make math and science available to popular audiences.A terceira parte comenta os projetos de línguas artificiais e a última traz lista de palavras para estudo. Book divisions: Part one - The Natural History ofLlanguage, Part Two - Our Hybrid Heritage, Part Three - The World Language Problem, Part Four - Language Museum. Os trechos mais divertidos são as tabelas comparativas em que podemos perceber padrões de semelhanças e diferenças nas línguas que evoluíram de uma língua comum.