Re: Books for conlangers

Hello!

On 9/9/05, ?? (kutsuwamushi) <snapping.dragon@...> wrote:
> I'd like to compile a list of book recommendations for conlangers, and
> I could use your help. I'm thinking of two categories:
>
> 1) Introductions to linguistics for beginners
> (General introductions and more advanced introductions to specific
> topics like phonetics, case, or whatever you find useful.)
As a general introduction, I'd recommend "An Introduction to Language"
by Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. It's not just well
written and covers all the basics (and bases ;) ; it's also fun to
read because it uses cartoons to illustrate many of the concepts
(imagine learning about parts of speech with the Peanuts, or about
dialects with Garfield) and still manages to remain serious enough. --
Also, it's the textbook we used in the Intro to General Linguistics
class I took all those years ago, so I know from personal experience
that it's actually useful. ;-)


Someone already mentioned the name Ladefoged, but I don't remember if
they also mentioned a specific book. Anyway, I'd like to recommend
"The Sounds of the World's Languages" by Peter Ladefoged and Ian
Maddieson. It lists and describes pretty much every possible speech
sound, and of course also some of the languages that use each point of
articulation, phonemic distinction, etc. described in the book. And
with the help of the graphics, it's even possible to learn to produce
all these sounds! (To a certain degree, at least. YMMV, as usual, but
I did learn to produce intervocalic clicks with the help of this book.
One of my proudest linguistic achievements. :)

(Oh, and of course I *have* to rave about that book, since my old
phonetics professor is one of the people whose praise of the book is
quoted on the back cover, at least of the edition I have. ;)


> 2) Books that are good for inspiration
> (Books like Mithun's _Languages of Native North America_ or _The
> World's Writing Systems_, which contain a lot of information on more
> than one language. Books that are about specific language families,
> like _The Slavonic Languages_, would be good too.)
Ah, the Mithun book. :-D I used to recommend stacks of specific
grammars to people -- "read this Georgian grammar to learn about
ergative, read that Arabic grammar to learn about verbal aspect, then
read this Sumerian grammar to learn about gender-specific language
use, and oh, you'll have to go back to the Georgian one to learn about
interesting consonant clusters" and so on. But ever since I found "The
Languages of Native North America", I can just tell them to read that
one instead. It has *everything*. :-)

Everything except grammatology, that is; which is where "The World's
Writing Systems" comes in. I think others have already mentioned that
it's horribly expensive; but it's well worth it (which also holds for
"The Languages of Native North America")...


Anyway, on to some books that (I think) haven't been mentioned yet.

In no particular order:

- "Aga Magera Difura: Dizionario delle Lingue Immaginarie"
  ("Dictionary of Imaginary Languages") by Paolo Albani and
  Berlinghiero Buonarroti. (For some reason I have a French edition of
  that one, so I think of it as the "Dictionnaire des langues
  imaginaires".) It doesn't give much detail on the languages it lists
  -- well, it has several thousand entries (not just about languages,
  but also on language creators, conworlds and concultures, etc.), so
  there's not that much room for every single one of them, and for
  many of the more exotic ones there doesn't seem to be much
  information available anyway. The book does contain some pretty
  arcane stuff, though (Picasso's "Unknown Language" lithographies,
  anyone?), and should be quite good for inspiration.

- "A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European
  Languages" by Carl Darling Buck. Excellent inspiration for lexicon
  building, or so I hope... Each chapter of the book deals with one
  semantic category ("Parts of the Body", "Dwelling, House,
  Furniture", "Quantity and Number", "Emotion", etc.) and each
  subchapter contains the words for a certain concept from that
  semantic category in several dozen Indo-European languages, both old
  (dead) and modern ones. Each of these word lists is followed by
  semantic and etymological explanations (words for concept X are
  often related, or even identical, to words for concept Y; the words
  for concept X in languages A and B come from the same root R but
  language C uses a different root; look, this is how Modern D's word
  developed from Classical D's word; and so on). The book was
  originally published in 1949, I think, so don't be surprised if you
  notice a reconstructed form doesn't fit a more recent sound change
  theory; but it's still a worderful source for inspiration about
  semantic relations. (It's also one of those books that you can just
  open on any random page and expect to find something fascinating
  there.) The only thing that's missing (or rather: the only thing
  that I miss) is an index of all the non-English roots and forms
  listed...

- For those who can read German: you should have a look at two volumes
  from the "dtv-Atlas" series, namely "dtv-Atlas Deutsche Sprache" by
  Werner König and "dtv-Atlas Namenkunde" by Konrad Kunze. Both
  contain much information about things like historical linguistics,
  dialectology, language standardization, language contact and so on
  -- information specific to the history, dialectology etc. of German,
  of course, but it will probably be useful when it comes to designing
  a history (or dialects, or names) for your own conlang. (The
  Namenkunde book concentrates on the subject of personal and place
  names, of course, but since most names ultimately come from "normal"
  words (and sometimes from foreign languages), it has to describe
  language history, dialectology, language contact etc. as well. The
  other book, on the other hand, has far less information on names and
  name-giving but at the same time more on the other subjects.)

- For information on some specific fascinating language types resp.
  phenomena, two books come to mind: "An Introduction to Pidgins and
  Creoles" by John Holm (an excellent introduction to language contact
  phenomena and the development of new languages from contact
  situations; also a few interesting things about typology); and "The
  Navajo Verb" by Leonard M. Faltz (what can I say -- Navajo verb
  morphology is quite different from anything I've seen before, and
  simply fascinating). :-)

- Reading a well-written grammar of any language can't hurt either.
  John W. M. Verhaar's "Toward a Reference Grammar of Tok Pisin" is
  one of my favorites -- not just because I think Tok Pisin is a
  fascinating language, but also because it's one of the best
  grammatical texts I've ever read. (As a linguist-by-training who
  works in the field of technical documentation, I'm naturally very
  keen on that kind of thing. ;) The book is well structured, and the
  author gives many examples for everything (the book is designed as
  "an experiment in corpus linguistics", so he has a large amount of
  text sources to draw examples from)... And he somehow even manages
  to explain things in such a way that interested laypersons should
  understand what he's talking about, even though he delves pretty
  deep into TP grammar; but at the same time he avoids slipping into a
  "pop linguistics, let's make it easy for the interested laypersons"
  writing style that would make professional linguists feel
  patronized. :-)

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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