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

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Thus état (state), étranger (stranger, foreigner), étoffe (stuff), éponge (sponge), épouse (spouse, wife), épicier (grocer—man who sells spices), and école (school) come to life if we know this. A synthetic international language must wait for adoption upon political and educational conditions which are not yet in sight. so im adding this idc🥴) ive read MOST pages tho and the sections I was really interested in (ie its part 2 and the part 4 when needed) besides some ppl even treat this book like dictionary and not to be read from page to page.

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. The author's treatise on the development of various Western languages from their Latin and Teutonic roots, however, was engaging. Edited by Lancelot Hogben, this book, concentrating on the European languages, demonstrates their commonalities, the regularities of changes as radicals move from language to language. One final note- the final section of the book has extensive word lists for the previously mentioned groups, as well as Greek roots used in scientific terminology. Each article originally printed in this magazine is available here, complete and unedited from the historical print.If you want a book that goes into depth of how Teutonic (Germanic) and Romance languages are similar and different to English, this may be the book for you. In fact they rarely acknowledge other languages, treating their subject as if it was the only language in the world. The book is a bit dated and exceptionally Eurocentric in terms of language used and general subject matter, but it is still admirably progressive is certain aspects.

The first two-thirds of the book was an incredibly in-depth analysis of the syntax of Romance and Germanic languages, especially as they apply to English. 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. 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. 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.The ideas will also work for languages like Catalan and Romanian, but you will have to find the relative shifts somewhere else, which won't be hard to do once you understand how they usually work. There are sections devoted to learning other Romance languages once you know your first one, I hope to make use of this someday! Anyways it's not the kind of book I can't read cover to cover but even a partial reading gives you a much better and more holistic sense of how language works.