Victoria Fromkin (1923–2000)

A lovely flashback to first year of university. Those heady days when I believed I'd emerge with a double degree in linguistics and history!

I still am fascinated by language. This book is a great introduction to the fundamental concepts of linguistics. Things like aphasia and child language acquisition are just endlessly fascinating, and this book explained them in a simple and readable manner.

The only part I had trouble with was my most disliked aspect within the subject of linguistics: show more phonetics. This is not the authors' fault, but to me, phonetics is just sooooo boring. That was why the I took like a year to finish the book - I put it down at that section and procrastinated picking it up again. Once I did however, I finished it quickly, and I'm glad I persevered or else I would have missed the part on computer language!

My copy is from 2002, so I'm sure there are recent updates in the field that I missed. Also, the examples listed of Kiwi slang were pretty weird. Neither me nor any of my friends recognised the term "feather dinks". show less

An extraordinary introduction to the study of language & linguistics; well-written, well-assembled & well-researched. Includes relevent cartoon panels to illustrate examples.

I've kept this book from my college days (and that was a very LONG time ago. It was, and is, a remarkably well-written book, and continues to be useful as a reference. I paid $19.15 in either 1979 or 1980; I'll bet it's quite a bit more now. It's still a great book.

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