Re: Good reads for the novice conlanger?

Quoting julien eychenne <eychenne.j@...>:

> On Tue, 6 Aug 2002 13:43:42 +0100
> bnathyuw <bnathyuw@...> wrote:
>
> > my other suggestion is just borrowing self-teaching
> > books on various natlangs ( or reading them in
> > bookshops ) as a good way of finding out
> > possibilities.
>
> Yes, this is certainly the best thing to do.
>
> Anyway, an excellent book is _The Origin of Language_ by Merritt Ruhlen. It
> is easy to read, fascinating and  it gives you a good overview of the
> phonetics of the languages of the world  : it's not intended to teach
> linguistics, but you can find there plenty of words from so different
> languages, and Ruhlen's hypothesis is really interesting.
Whatever the merits of his prose style, Ruhlen's ideas about
long-range historical comparison are *very* controversial,
and should not be taken as representative of the majority
of people working in his field.  This is especially true
about his discussion about the languages of the Americas.

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Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
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