Re: more book advice

Nicole,

In answer to your question:

>Hello all.  Since summer is coming up (read:  since my free time will
>soon grow exponentially), and since I have a lil extra money, I've been
>thinking to reward myself with a New Non-Fiction (read:  expensive)
>Book.  I think I want to get something on Indo-European linguistics,
>either that or an introduction to some other language family.  So, does
>anyone have any recommendations?  (When I say "other language family," I
>really do mean just about anything, be it Asian, African or Native
>American.  I just want to read about something new to me, and
>interesting.)
There is one book that's the virtual bible for general linguistics I and
other recommend above all else: _The World's Major Languages_, ed. Bernard
Comrie.  The Big Green Book I call it.  I checked that book out not a few
times, but the last time I had it in my hands, it was stolen!  (Now who
would steal a highly technical book without pictures of naked people?!)

I found that book in two libraries: the Steen Library at Stephen F. Austin
State in Nacogdoches [Texas] and (until the book was lost) the Kurth
Memorial Library, the public library here in Lufkin [also in Texas].

Dang I want that book back.  I had to donate two books, one of them a big
Oxford NRSV Bible *with* the Deuteronicals/Apocrypha.  (Well, the Vatican
rejected that translation; we use the New American in Catholic Mass readings
here in the US anyway.  And I found an NAB for $5.99 anyway, much less than
the $40-some-odd I paid for the big red Oxford bible.)

The languages discussed in depth are -- heh, I've memorized them all:

English (including Old and Middle)
German
Dutch (including Afrikaans)
Latin (Classical and Vulgar)
French
Spanish
Italian
Portuguese
Romanian (or Rumanian; I prefer the former spelling)
Russian
Polish
Czech and Slovak
Serbian and Croatian
Bulgarian (?)
Greek (Classical, Koine and Modern)
Sanskrit
Hindi and Urdu
Bengali
Persian (Farsi, Dari and Tajik)
Pashto (or Pushtu, Pakhto, etc.)
Hungarian
Finnish
Turkish (and general Turkic languages)
Arabic
Hebrew
Hausa (and general Chadic)
Tamil (and general Dravidian)
Chinese (the "Big Five" especially Mandarin)
Burmese
Thai
Vietnamese
Malay and Indonesian
Tagalog
Yoruba
Swahili (and general Bantu)

There are also writings on Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Semitic and a few
minor languages.  And you can find certain factoids like the Dyirbal word
for "dog", Basque ergative case, Cree "fourth person" and Hixkaryana's OVS
word order.

I've also read Mario Pei's work (which is outdated but useful), and of
course I'd read other Comrie works, Indo-Europeanists like Thomas
Gamkrelidze and Peter (?) Ivanov, alternative proto-language theory by
Joseph Greenberg (the champion of the theory of the Amerind superfamily of
languages among other things).  I used to chew the fat with the members of
the Nostratic and Indo-European lists (before they became dead and bloated);
Larry Trask is a Basque expert, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal is another expert
who knows Russian so he could translate some of Vladimir Ilich-Svitych's
Nostratic word root list.

Online, Cyril Babaev has a GREAT site on Indo-European, and some links to
other cool stuff:

http://indoeuropean.nm.ru/ (English)
http://indoeuropean.da.ru/ (Russian)

Sergei Starostin, another Russian (they sure have a lot of good linguists
there!) has a lot of data on language families ranging from Altaic to North
Caucasian to Sino-Tibetan, with a few Semitic words and verb skeletons:

http://starling.rinet.ru (English and Russian)

For the web's All-You-Can-Eat Chinese spot:

http://zhongwen.com

A bunch of on-line dictionaries:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/

Just for grins: a website on Japanese, in Italian:

http://algol.sirius.pisa.it/japan/

Starostin's page of links is:

http://starling.rinet.ru/links.htm

But some of these URL's are outdated.  However, you should be detoured to
the new website; good webpagers always leave a trail of links.

Mazel tov!

DaW.
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