Product Description

From English, French, Spanish and Russian to Pashto, Tagalog, and Swahili, this is the first comprehensive reference work to provide detailed information about the world's forty major languages. Written by acknowledged specialists in the field, the volume begins with a general introduction to language and language families, followed by language-family sections that provide an informative essay about that language, and individual chapters that discuss the history, distribution, syntax, grammar and punctuation, writing and spelling systems, standards of usage, and other important aspects of each language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212759 in Books
• Published on: 1990-06-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1040 pages

From Library Journal
This is a treasury of authoritative yet concise information about major languages and language families. The emphasis is on Indo-European, over half the book being devoted to that family. Each of the 50 chapters is written by an expert in that field. Phonology, morphology, and syntax are discussed, and, where appropriate, the writing system. Some chapters, such as that on Chinese, are very lucid and accessible to the non-expert; others are more difficult. This is not a book for beginners, and specialists will have more detailed treatments at their disposal. Its best use would seem to be in an academic reference collection, for the scholar to dip into to refresh his or her memory of a language once studied, or to get a birds-eye view of a language not studied. Includes a language index and bibliographies. Catherine V. von Schon, SUNY at Stonybrook Lib.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
`This 1000 plus page reference work would certainly be a useful and impressive acquisition to any linguist's bookshelf ... It is a veritable mine of knowledge concerning language knowledge, and anyone with an interest in this field is bound to find the book a fascinating source of information.' - Language Monthly

`This 1000 plus page reference work would certainly be a useful and impressive acquisition to any linguists bookshelf ... It is a veritable mine of knowledge concerning language knowledge, and anyone with an interest in this field is bound to find the book a fascinating source of information. - Language Monthly

`This work has a rare combination of virtues ... it can be recommended as a useful work of reference to which contributions have been made by a large team of scholars.' - Journal of Linguistics

`This work has a rare combination of virtues ... it can be recommended as a useful work of reference to which contributions have been made by a large team of scholars. - Journal of Linguistics

Review

"A magnificent piece of scholarship and editorical assembling, at--considering what books cost today--a surprisingly low price."--R.M.R. Hall, Queens College, CUNY
"This is the most thorough survey of languages and language families that I have seen which is suitable for undergraduate courses. The scholarship offers models to emulate while the selection of language groups and contributors can only serve to broaden multi-cultural awareness in students."--Patricia S. Burton, Northeast Missouri State University
"The best extant survey on the subject. It would be an excellent text for a course on world languages, or even one in general linguistics."--William E. McMahon, University of Akron
"The amount and quality of historical, sociological, and linguistic information presented in typical chapters dealing with a given language are amazing. Most chapters also include extensive descriptions of the phonological and graphic systems, morphology, word-formation, syntactic patterns, and characteristic features of the lexicon. For inflected languages, detailed and synoptic charts of major declension and conjugation classes are provided....This unique work is an important and reliable source of extensive knowledge about particular languages and their families."--American Reference Books Annual
"This impressive volume supersedes similar ones...in its treatment of families of languages and individual idioms."--Language Problems and Language Planning
"An excellent survey....The volume is recommended as a standard reference for all institutional libraries and for general readers."--Choice
"A treasury of authoritative yet concise information about major languages and language families."--Library Journal
"A substantial resource on modern languages....Recommended for all academic and large public libraries."--The Reference Book Review

Customer Reviews

amazing
I got this book for $9.00 plus 3.99 S&H. Amazing price and amazing delivery!! Got it in less than a week!!

The best of its kind
This is the best survey of the world's languages that I have come across. Although it is written by scholars for scholars to read, and parts of it are quite technical, nearly all of it can easily be understood by non-specialists. Taking (at random, the place where the book fell open) the chapter on Bengali as an example, the introduction describing the historical background occupies a little more than three pages and can be read by anyone. It is followed by a few pages on the writing and sound system, illustrated with appropriate tables and no more technical than it needs to be. The longest section is on morphology, and is again quite understandable. Afterwards comes a section on syntax, followed by concluding points. Altogether the chapter occupies 24 pages and is representative of the book as a whole.

The most difficult point to decide in compiling a book of this kind is the choice of languages to include: what constitutes a "major language"? On the whole the editors have taken the view that the importance of a language is determined by the number of speakers, but they have not been entirely rigid about that: Kannada, for example, has far more speakers than Czech and Slovak together, but is not included, whereas they are. There are others, such as Quechua (already mentioned by other reviewers), and the languages of the highlands of New Guinea (the most linguistically diverse region in the world) that have an interest that goes beyond their purely numerical importance. However, the book already has more than 1000 pages, and it is much too easy to think of other languages to include, but much more different to think of ones to leave out.

The obvious choice (for me) would have been the chapter on Czech and Slovak -- not important enough numerically, not different enough from Russian, Polish and Serbo-Croat -- but apart from them it is very difficult to think of anything else to exclude to make room for others. Czech and Slovak (and to some degree Serbo-Croat, or Serbian and Croat as we call them today) illustrate another difficulty. The book was published in 1990, right at the end of a period in which the two languages had been moving together, and had become "on average 90 per cent mutually intelligible", but in the years since then they have been moving apart. Today's Slovaks would doubtless be happy to see their language included at all, but might be less happy to see it treated as little more than a variant version of Czech.

What of Spanish and Portuguese, both of them major languages by any standards, but, at least in written form, quite similar to one another and mutually intelligible for educated readers (again, in written form)? Rather than having two separate chapters occupying more than 40 pages, with abundant detail about their separate characteristics, but very little comparison and contrasting, it might have been more useful and interesting to deal with them (together with Catalan and Galician).

But these are minor quibbles. It would have been impossible to include all the languages one would like to see without going to several thousand pages, or a very different sort of book, with very little detailed information about each one. Mario Pei's various books were of this latter type, but of a far lower intellectual quality and much more superficial. As it stands Comrie's book can be thoroughly recommended, and at less than 4 cents per page (for the paperback) the price is very reasonable.

Good Survey
This book is a great, if dense, survey of the world's languages. As the title says, the book covers only "major languages" (for this reason, the Celtic languages are not included; neither are any Native American languages). The book is very thorough in its subject area (an overview, not a grammar primer). However, there are several negative points. The quality of the chapters, as noted by the two-star reviewer, does vary somewhat (although perhaps not as much as he makes it sound--no chapter is noticeably unprofessional throughout). There is also no unifying phonetic transcription. Some chapters use IPA, others a language-specific representation, and still others none at all. Finally, some chapters seem not to be very well organized (the Sanskrit chapter comes to mind--it contains far too much text and not enough charts or examples). The book also suffers from Euro-centrism, with several sections devoted to the various Indo-European language families of Europe and only one for the IE languages of India. The rest of the book does not seem as well-covered as the Indo-European language chapters.

In response to the complaint about Native American languages, I see both sides: Comrie's intent was to create a description of major languages. Whatever they may be, the Native American languages cannot really be called "major" (although Cherokee, Quechua, and perhaps Nahuatl come close). This is not to say that they do not deserve inclusion, though, so I see where the two-star reviewer was coming from. This does not, however, meant that the book is not worth purchasing--it certainly is.