The best Linguistics Reference books: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The movie is okay as a movie, but as as far as historical value goes, it's more in the 'inspired by' category. They touch upon a few of the moments and ideas presented here, however.

For a more (and way more interestingly brought) in depth explanation, I can recommend 'The Code Book' by Simon Singh (amazon)

So, telling your mom that you're something that doesn't exist ("queer", trans and now non-binary) is "beautiful"? All in 2 years. Is she going through all the labels she wrote about in her book, which she calls "super-gay"? How old is she, for crying out loud? [edit] 26? Really? Acts like 12 and sounds like 6.

Using that pollyanna personality to blog her life and get "fans". What normal person does that if they have little or no talent?

If I were her mom, I'd take her to a decent therapist and find out what issue(s) is involved in her disordered thinking. Mom already knew because she read the book that her daughter wrote:

The ABC's of LGBT+ Paperback – September 25, 2016

https://www.amazon.com/ABCs-LGBT-Ashley-Mardell/dp/163353409X/ref=redir_mobile_desktop?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=abcs%20of%20lgbt%2B&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&psc=1&qid=1519424208&ref_=mp_s_a_1_1&sr=8-1-spons

Mom: "Whatever."

Hilarious re-enactment of what a Neanderthal may have sounded like.

P.s. If you are interested in language, The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher a great pop-sci book, and introduction to modern theory.

Great question! I haven't seen it come up as an answer yet, so I hope I'm providing new information here.

There is indeed a peculiar tribe in the Amazon that is known for its almost total lack of rituals or traditions.

This is the only source I could find real quick on the Pirahas and burials.

With that said, I'll give my two-cents on them and hope that someone here can back me up.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, a Christian missionary was assigned to the Pirahas to (1) convert them to Christianity, and (2) learn their language and culture.

He wasn't successful with (1) BECAUSE of (2). During his time with the Pirahas, he came to the conclusion that they are a people without rituals, gods, myths, and therefore could not be converted.

I'd highly recommend his book if you're looking for something about peoples with "non-cultures." It has the perfect mix of linguistics, anthropology and personal accounts of his time with the Pirahas.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

A lot of people swear by Wheelock's Latin; it can be obtained for $16 on Amazon. I took the Cambridge course(the first two books, but online, I think?), however I believe it's a bit more expensive.

Wheelock uses original Latin texts, Cambridge uses a made up story about a family. Wheelock might also be a bit heavy; Cambridge was pretty easy, at least as far as I got.

Also worth mentioning is lingua latina per se illustrata, which is a book entirely in Latin, and you pretty much just learn by immersion. PDFs can be found with minimal work.

Don't Sleep There are Snakes by Daniel Everett

Dr. Everett went to the Amazon jungle in the 1970's to learn the language of the Piraha people in order to put their language into writing and then translate the Bible into that language. He eventually got his PhD in linguistics.

The Piraha people have so sense of time - no past or future. They only use "within our senses" or "not within our senses". If something is not within their sight or sound or smell, it doesn't exist for all intents and purposes.

Dr. Everett may be a good place to find more information for your research.

edit: spelling

You should read this book. Language is a living breathing thing, evolving and mutating as it goes. Languages are literally history changing words and meanings with the eb and flow of power.

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/dp/006052085X

Yes, if I remember correctly, this is noticeable in the Pirahã community, which you can read about through Daniel Everett's research. The following book is a good entry point, but you'll have to search around for the bit where he discusses how the community treats children as independent adults, with little to no protective behaviour.

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120

This is very hard to tell since everyone learns differently. For me was it "Remembering the Kanji" to learn recognizing the Kanji abd Kana and Genki to learn grammatical basics and vocab. Also making your own Anki deck helps in my experience.

Also visit r/LearnJapanese to get some hints.

I'm reading "power of babel" by John McWhorter.

Language is a living breathing oozing system of human communication that is tied to time, political landscape, technology and even disease. Worth a read.

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/dp/006052085X

If you don’t mind using a free trial, there’s a book on Kindle Unlimited that helped me get a little bit of a grasp on this sort of thing. And, if you read it before your trial expires, Amazon should give the author money in return! The ABCs of LGBT+ by Ashley Mardell

Daniel Everett also wrote a book, not an academic study, more of a memoir. Amazon

And here is a talk he gave to the FFRF (Freedon from religion foundation) on the subject.

Check this out at the library.

You should join the latin subreddit! There's a lot of religious people on there but there's also really good latin stuff.

I learned from Wheelock's Latin, but I hear that the Cambridge Latin Course is very good as well. I've been thinking about going over the basics again.

I get the itch to translate the first few pages de Bellum Gaulicum every few years or so.

Mostly agree. However, in 1000 years, they would have a difficult time understanding anything we were saying. Cars could easily be called cows. Language changes over time, but needs to be maintained in the short term to have the ability to effectively communicate.

This book is an excellent read on the topic - The Power of Babel

If you go over to the Mandarin or Japanese subreddit and ask this question, you'll get a brawl fight :P

I started Mandarin after Japanese, so the characters were a non-issue for me in Mandarin. When I was studying Japanese, I did a crash course in ~3,000 characters before I finished my first textbook. I liked that approach for a few reasons:

• I was juggling a few things at the time, and doing this let me establish a helpful foundation without having to think very hard
• I was living in Japan at the time, and learning to recognize the characters was a massive quality of life increase; it wasn't perfect, like I said, but it was enough that I could basically understand what I was eating, get the gist of headlines, understand signs, etc
• Having the characters out of the way made it very easy to learn vocabulary afterwards (they were no longer totally foreign things... I was just combining characters I already knew)

But there are also good arguments against this sort of thing:

• It's really hard to know which characters you will and won't need.... you'll definitely end up "wasting" time on some characters that you likely won't ever see again
• The meanings of the characters are often somewhat flexible — you're sort of learning a bunch of fancy symbols for English rather than actually learning JP/CN
• There are several excellent tools (Migaku's Kanji God, Wani-Kani, Skritter, etc) that let you learn the characters as you go and within the context of the language... compared to when the above book came out 40-50 years ago, the benefit you get from "delaying" the start of you learn is becoming somewhat questionable

Highly recommend you pick up the book Fluent Forever, I spun my wheels on grammar for my whole life and finally started making progress with this. Seriously, if this is important to you, it's the best $15 you will ever spend.

tl;dr:

The human mind internalizes the grammar of any new language by receiving comprehensible input. Sure, you can consciously learn the rules of grammar (which is a great starting point), but your internal "language machine" will only spontaneously generate correct output once it has taken enough input to learn the rules. And even then, it will only learn the rules IN A SPECIFIC ORDER WITHOUT SKIPPING ANY STEPS. So you can drill grammar exercises all day, but it will never actually make a difference to your writing/speech until you have progressed through ALL the necessary prerequisite steps.

The approach from the book is simple enough: use your conscious knowledge of grammar to create new sentences, give them to someone to correct as necessary (italki.com or hinative.com), and then use them to make Anki flash cards. Grammar comes down to three basic things: add new words, change the order of the words, or change the form of the word - that last one being the difficult part of Greek for native English speakers. As you continually see correct phrases and sentences and test yourself on those three things, your mind will internalize the grammar rules behind them, in whatever order it needs to.

While you’re not dealing with a dead language, a common self study book for Latin is Wheelock’s Latin. Btw good luck with your thesis, I was briefly interested in that language but turned away once I found few resources on it.

^ That directly answers your question. I'll caveat that there is some criticism over its avoidance of Kanji. It's common to pair a textbook/grammar course like this with learning first radicals & common Kanji and then building vocabulary (using kanji). A commonly used tool for this is WaniKani. (Another is some version of Remembering the Kanji paired with Anki.)

And regardless of what method you go with, immersion is highly useful in cementing the knowledge. You can find tons of resources for that in r/LearnJapanese and r/Refold (^(the latter of which is a language learning strategy that started with Japanese but isn't exclusive to it)). Graded readers, easy news sites, podcasts aimed at learners, etc. all help the acquisition of the language.

I dunno, yogHurt sounds too painful for me!

I'm just messing with you. This book has a lot of humor you might appreciate - https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380715430/ref=sr\_1\_1?crid=3HU85NOCC6LEZ&keywords=bill+bryson+mother+tongue&qid=1660461952&s=books&sprefix=billy+bryson+mother+tongue%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C256&sr=1-1

While u/kilenc is correct that we don't know for sure where the Semitic root system came from, that doesn't mean you're on your own. You don't have to do all the guesswork yourself, because others have already done plenty of it. The most accessible resource is this video by Biblaridion, but if you're willing to spend some money, The Unfolding of Language might be worth picking up.

It's so wonderful! I did not know they have an app, I AM DOWNLOADING omg.

Oh, you know what book you might love: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/dp/006052085X

It's an intro-level book about linguistics and how languages diverge/evolve...it's like popular science writing, but about language, and was recommended to me as a fun read by my academic supervisor (who speaks like 10 languages, which is nuts). I bet you could get it on libgen if not though Amazon or (best option) ordering to your lpcal book shop.

Thanks for the great news about the app, and I hope you keep up your curiosity about language going forward, it makes life a lot more interesting :)

I am referring to the kanji learning system popularized by this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0824835921/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=K51V9VQUC92X&keywords=remember+the+kanji&qid=1651159488&sprefix=remember+the+kanji%2Caps%2C221&sr=8-1 It breaks kanji down into smaller building blocks and makes you memorize mnemonics to recall the full kanji. Nowadays there are several systems like it, but the original Remember the Kanji remains popular.

Wheelock's Latin was the textbook that I was assigned in college. It's used pretty regularly as far as I can tell in classical education settings.

Less mathy then what you are wanting, and I havent read it yet, but i was taking a cybersecurity course and when we went over encryption, our instructor recommended this book:

"The Code Book" By Simon Singh
Subtitle: The science of secrecy from ancient Egypt to quantum cryptography

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Science-Secrecy-Cryptography/dp/0385495323

While it's true that it can't be the only technique you use, it is very useful for building vocabulary and learning grammar if you do it right. I highly recommend this book which speaks specifically to how to use Anki correctly for language learning: https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget/dp/0385348118

>so apparently he's in contact with another never-a-JW who is also working on your JW's critical thinking skills? That's GREAT news!

Well, as I said before, I know he knows other non-JW people, mainly fellow artists, even though most probably not too close. So I'm not surprised he knows this guy, too. But it's so strange that he writes that kind of stuff now. It seems more like provocation to me, at the moment. He recently still wrote about that "serving God" stuff (and God won't judge him for his personality disorder, because it's not his fault etc.), while at the same time criticizing a few things the WT teaches. It was in that context when he was offended when I suspected him of having used a certain situation to "preach" (and report the time) and said, he's not the JWs' idiot. So my impression is rather that he tries to demonstrate how open-minded and free and independent he is, while still being a JW.

(this is the book he says he read: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=2PPSB0VSY4AWS&keywords=Daniel+Everett&qid=1644007474&sprefix=daniel+everett%2Caps%2C168&sr=8-2)

I don't know...

Still have to reread but this seems like a decent summary. I definitely originally read the piece as Wallace aligning with prescriptivism (these terms aren't capitalized except by him), and again, it's notable that most of the linguists did too. It could be that people who first encountered the concept of descriptivism here found the essay mind-expanding, whereas it misrepresented descriptivism violently enough that already-descriptivists thought Wallace must be a prescriptivist.

On your last point we should distinguish between 'elitism' about arbitrary things like what linguistic variety you use vs. non-arbitrary things like being right about factual or scientific matters. There's nothing inconsistent about being the second kind of elitist while disdaining the first kind. I wouldn't even call the second kind elitism.

>Variations on ways of saying "This is such obviously garbage that I don't even need to say why it's garbage"

Right, unfortunately most of this is linguistics people writing for each other and not feeling the need to spell things out because, as the commenter you quoted mentioned, the major errors are elementary.

In case I never get around to an in-depth comment, I'll drop this book recommendation. It's an entertaining read and McWhorter does a great job of conveying the worldview of linguistic descriptivism: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/dp/006052085X

Flash cards and anki are great for learning vocabulary, for some people. It is important to keep in mind when people on the internet give advice, it is always from their perspective and their opinion. I have a high opinion of flash cards and of anki.

But learning to use Anki can be hard. The book Fluent Forever is largely a Anki Tutorial. Plus there are many youtube videos that offer help.

 

Building anki flash cards used to be one of my favorite things.

When I get a new word I want to learn.

I look it up in a translating dictionary. Then I look it up in a target language dictionary. I read both definitions to see If I understand how it is used.

I read the IPA and syllabification to make sure I know how the word is pronounced. I include this on the card.

I look it up in context on reverso. If there is a good sentence I add it to a card.

I look up google image searches of the word. I pick and image or do a composite to represent it. I include that on the card(s).

I decide which definition I want to learn for that card. If there are many meanings I sometimes make multiple cards.

If it is a verb i make sure I know the past participle and if it is transitive or intransitive. I put that on its own card. (Studying Italian so those two are important.)

I build the card or cards with all these elements.

My opinion is that building the card is the most important part of learning the word. The card is just something that helps me remember all that research I did on that one word.

The "ir + a + infinitivo" future tense structure, as in Voy a estudiar, is newer than the future tense conjugation, as in Estudiaré, and is in the process of replacing it. That is, it is now used more than the future tense conjugation, which is increasingly restricted to a specialized meaning: expressing likelihood (Serán las dos 'It's probably 2:00').

Incidentally, the Spanish future conjugation, which replaced the original Latin future conjugation, started out as a structure based on the verb haber 'to have'. For example, estudiaré was originally estudiar he meaning 'I have to study.'

So here we have a really nice example of the cycle of grammar evolution: a structure using an auxiliary verb (estudiar he) grows into a conjugation (estudiaré) and is eventually replaced by another structure using an auxiliary verb (voy a estudiar).

If you find this interesting you would love Guy Deutscher's book <em>The Unfolding of Language</em>. It's one of my all-time favorites, and this is one of his core examples.