Re: Desiring good English to Greek / Greek to English and English to Latin / Latin to English books

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 12:07 AM, Nomad of Norad -- David C Hall
<nomad-conlang@...> wrote:
> ROGER MILLS wrote:
>> Nomad wrote:
>>> Oh yeah, and what's the best beginners book on learning the art of
>>> conlanging?  :-D
>> Isn't there something on Zompist, How to Create a Language sort of thing??
>> Ah yes: http://zompist.com/kit.html   I also remember Pablo Flores' similar
>> and very good pages on the same subject, but I'm not sure they're still
>> available.
The Zompist language creation kit is probably the best available;
the Conlang Wikibook is less complete, but covers a few topics
that Rosenfelder's book doesn't, IIRC.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Conlang

A while ago the Language Creation Society started a mailing
list with discussion toward collaboratively writing a how-to
conlanging textbook, but that appears to be long dormant.

> Actually, what I meant was... is there a layman's book about the mechanics
> of languages?  Understanding the terminology, understanding the
> pronunciation-codes, and stuff... from the perspective of someone
wanting to
> get a basic grasp of linguistics and of comparing different langauges...
I found John Lyons _Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics_
helpful, but others can probably recommend something newer.
I'll second the recommendation of Payne's _Describing Morphosyntax_;
it's probably a good second book to read after something
like Lyons that gives an overview of linguistics and introduces basic
terminology.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry