Wayne Harbert

Typically, this sort of survey starts with a few chapters about the family as a whole, followed by descriptions of individual languages. Harbert instead organizes this book around various grammatical topics, for each investigating how they are realized in the various languages. I think I prefer this approach.

Something I found interesting is how often English agrees with the Scandinavian languages against Continental West Germanic. The Norman Conquest gets all the press, but the Danish ones, show more too, left a deep linguistic impact. show less