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

Product Information

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. A comical amount of time is spent complaining about flexion of the various languages, and how English is the saviour for its speakers for removing most of them. 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.

Native English speakers have a head start learning a bunch of vocab if you only know This One Weird Trick of how your common ancestor language usually diverged.UPDATE: Here are spreadsheets of the Romance Word List, Germanic Word List, and the Greek Roots List from the language museum. Book divisions: Part one - The Natural History ofLlanguage, Part Two - Our Hybrid Heritage, Part Three - The World Language Problem, Part Four - Language Museum. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages--Teutonic, Romance, Greek--helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. Unique Leather Bound Edition having Spine and corners bind with leather with Golden Leaf Printing on round spine.

Bodmer manages to present many of the more interesting anecdotes of linguistic lore in a truly accessible fashion, which alone is worth the time of working through this sizable volume.I love the word dictionary at the back, and i would love to have the same but for phrases for select languages. The last third was grandpa going on a rant, mischaracterizing several international languages, and dreaming up an international auxiliary language that would be more efficient than any other invented before.