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Hi!
I'm hoping my tribe friends can recommend a good place to start for a non-academic with an interest in linguistics, especially language origin. I've a little training in phonetics and have studied language make-up for quite a while (mainly Irish Gaelic) but wanted a good information text about language in general, it's development and it's major components that's also a good read.
Thanks for your help!
I'm hoping my tribe friends can recommend a good place to start for a non-academic with an interest in linguistics, especially language origin. I've a little training in phonetics and have studied language make-up for quite a while (mainly Irish Gaelic) but wanted a good information text about language in general, it's development and it's major components that's also a good read.
Thanks for your help!
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Re: Where to begin...
Tue, May 24, 2005 - 1:56 PMoooh where to begin, difficult choice- i recommend reading the Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, its a good general beginning as to how the brain forms language. also a funny read. -
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Re: Where to begin...
Fri, June 10, 2005 - 4:40 PMYou beat me to it! Great book.
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Re: Where to begin...
Tue, May 24, 2005 - 5:13 PMThe text used in my Intro to Linguistics class, Contemporary Linguistics, I think was totally excellent. I can't imagine that there is a better one out there that surveys the whole field.
www.amazon.com/exec/obido...810-2022331
As a textbook, it is absurdly overpriced, but as a textbook, it is abundantly available used at cheap prices. -
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Re: Where to begin...
Tue, May 24, 2005 - 7:04 PMI always start with a humorous approach (like George Carlin or Bill Bryson) before building up to the real mind-melters (Chomsky). -
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Re: Where to begin...
Tue, May 24, 2005 - 9:13 PMI found this annotated list about linguistics books at amazon.com by Andrew Carnie, who wrote the textbook my Syntax class used.
www.amazon.com/exec/obido...810-2022331
I liked Carnie's textbook btw, which was written in about as clear and accessible language as Chomskyan transformational grammar can be rendered. The class was still torture (and many students had to repeat it) but it would have been even worse without his nice textbook.
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Unsu...
Re: Where to begin...
Fri, June 10, 2005 - 12:18 PMJust saw an ad in the current Atlantic Monthly for a set of 36 30-minute lectures by John McWhorter (of Stanford). It looks really interesting - basically intro to all the sexy parts of linguistics (language change/death, pidgins and creoles, dialects, etc.). They have it on sale for $100 for the DVD right now:
www.teach12.com/ttc/assets...ns/1600.asp -
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Re: Where to begin...
Sat, June 11, 2005 - 7:04 AMSpeaking of John McWhorter, definitely check out his book, "The Power of Babel". It helped get me hooked on linguistics several years ago and I later read it again as a textbook in a college linguistics course. It is fascinating if you're interested in the history of languages, and its funny too!
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Re: Where to begin...
Sat, June 11, 2005 - 2:59 PMWell, I don't have anything as cool as previous recommendations, but I'll say "Language and Its Structure" by Ronald W. Langacker. It's a good basic book, and was the book I was using when I first fell in love with linguistics.
Craig
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Re: Where to begin...
Sun, August 14, 2005 - 10:21 AMI, pesonally, enjoyed very much reading Melvyn Bragg`s "The Adventure of English". There is a superb new histury of the English language (the biography). Writing style there is very catching.
