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

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An excellent contrast between the table manners and the traffic rules of a language guides the presentation. 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. I have been interested in languages since my big sister started learning her first foreign language and I realized there is such a thing. The author's purpose was to aid people to be able to communicate with each other so that understanding between people would contribute to the prevention of future wars. 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.

While speaking English might be a disincentive to learn other languages, it can also be a great base to learn from due to its hybrid Germanic/Romantic vocabulary. 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. The author's treatise on the development of various Western languages from their Latin and Teutonic roots, however, was engaging.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.

Some other reviews I've seen make a big deal out of the book being written in 1944, and using words like talkies and gramophone. 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. The Loom of Language helps learners avoid wasted time by explaining how things normally go for the various languages.Boards have moderate shelf wear with mild bumping and fraying to corners and crushing and fraying to spine ends. The sections of interest to me right now were written for a very specific audience: native English speakers intent on learning Romance and Teutonic languages. So if, like me, you've had the experience of learning both, these statements will ring true and you can trust the other tips and ideas. It uses written Chinese as a language to use as a grammar syntax benchmark, and takes a shallow look into other languages like Persian, Bantu, Arabic, and others — including some Slavic.

Although I've gone much farther in my study of languages and of linguistics, this book will remain dear to my heart forever.

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. 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. 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.

Em mais de uma ocasião, ao ser questionado sobre dicas para aprender mais de um idioma, o professor Olavo de Carvalho recomendou este livro: The Loom of Language: A guide to foreign languages for the home student. Well suited for older people and laymen who are interested in languages and linguistics, but certainly not very technical or scientific. 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. 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.

It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages—Teutonic, Romance, Greek—helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. Essa consciência é obtida através do estudo da evolução das línguas e da análise das peculiaridades do nosso próprio idioma. But this book is more than a guide to foreign languages; it goes deep into the roots of all knowledge as it explores the history of speech.