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Loading... How Language Worksby David Crystal
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. An overview of the study of language. Sounds interesting - promising all sorts of insights and snippets, but ends up reading like an extended index (Crystal is a noted indexer!) and manages to make an interesting topic boring. Read May 2009. (  ) mbmackay | Jun 13, 2009 |  Disappointing. Far too superficial and too focused on issues that aren't really linguistic in nature (how written language differs from spoken). Several chapters toward the end are devoted toward capsule descriptions of language families -- potentially interesting, but they didn't actually say much of anything ABOUT the languages in question, instead limiting themselves to number of speakers, geography, and related languages. There was basically nothing about the structure of other languages; it seemed very English-focused to me. I was skimming by the time I was halfway through, in sharp contrast to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct which I've read more than once and found absolutely fascinating. (  ) lorax | Jun 2, 2008 | A very comprehensive overview of language in all its forms. From babies first words to the internet, spoken, gestured, written, and electronic to list a few. It is a complex subject covered in a way thats is neither boring or confusing. (  )1  peterannis | Jan 17, 2008 | I think this would be a good absolute first linguistics book - it does a good job of touching on absolutely everything that might come up in the study of linguistics, but there wasn't much depth, which is to be expected, I guess. I think the problem was just that I have already read a couple of books on language and linguistics, so most of the information was already known to me (not to sound like an expert, which I am certainly not!). Overall, I found it was really a slog getting through this book - reading bits for nearly nine months! (  ) fannyprice | Jan 7, 2008 | An excellent overview of the subject - thorough, well-structured and occasionally amusing. Don't expect a great read for the airplane, since it's put together so that each section can be read independently of the others, but it's a very useful reference book. (  ) paulcurrion | Dec 12, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400)
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