If you're interested in a broad overview of languages, not just in studying one of them, then you're going to come across this treasure trove of a book at some stage in your travels.

This book is simply awesome in documenting the history and evolution of Teutonic and Latin languages and tracing parallels of language evolution. Hogben was educated at Cambridge as a biologist, but never limited himself to a single field of inquiry. Bodmer manages to present many of the more interesting anecdotes of linguistic lore in a truly accessible fashion, which alone is worth the time of working through this sizable volume.It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a languages as it is actually used in everyday life. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. An excellent contrast between the table manners and the traffic rules of a language guides the presentation. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages--Teutonic, Romance, Greek--helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. The English language is a mongrel, consisting of 29% Norman French vocab grafted onto German grammar, with an incredible 9% of our vocab coming from Greek as well.

It lights up the dim pathways of prehistory and unfolds the story of the slow growth of human expression from the most primitive signs and sounds to the elaborate variations of the highest cultures. Nas fotos (link abaixo) coloquei dois exemplos: a semelhança do verbo ter nas línguas teutônicas e as mudanças fonéticas nas línguas românicas. Thus état (state), étranger (stranger, foreigner), étoffe (stuff), éponge (sponge), épouse (spouse, wife), épicier (grocer—man who sells spices), and école (school) come to life if we know this. One of Hogben's most ambitious projects emerged rather accidentally; in 1940, he and his daughter were trapped in Oslo, Norway, by the German invasion. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses.This last point really shows the assumptions made but not clarified in the first part, namely that learning a language is about memorizing a list of words and "redundancies" in language must be bad. Native English speakers have a head start learning a bunch of vocab if you only know This One Weird Trick of how your common ancestor language usually diverged. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages—Teutonic, Romance, Greek—helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns.

When an accented é precedes t, p, or c at the beginning of a modern French word it often takes the place of the Latin s in English words of Romance origin. There are examples like "I wash" (which means I'm bathing myself in that era) which are used to show how "English has evolved so much further than other European languages" by even being able to remove personal pronouns via the use of context. A synthetic international language must wait for adoption upon political and educational conditions which are not yet in sight. UPDATE: Here are spreadsheets of the Romance Word List, Germanic Word List, and the Greek Roots List from the language museum. The ideas will also work for languages like Catalan and Romanian, but you will have to find the relative shifts somewhere else, which won't be hard to do once you understand how they usually work.so im adding this idc🥴) ive read MOST pages tho and the sections I was really interested in (ie its part 2 and the part 4 when needed) besides some ppl even treat this book like dictionary and not to be read from page to page.