(Part 2) Best linguistics reference books according to redditors

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We found 1,077 Reddit comments discussing the best linguistics reference books. We ranked the 452 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.

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Top Reddit comments about Linguistics Reference:

u/_yourekidding · 52 pointsr/atheism

Read the book, quite extradordinary.

u/Clive_Staples_Lewis · 19 pointsr/askphilosophy

You should check out two books: This anthology edited by Martinich & Sosa (has the major, classic readings and a lot more), and Scott Soames' introductory book. Soames' book is a fairly gentle walkthrough of some important contemporary topics.

If you're looking for names: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Kripke, Davidson, Kaplan, Chomsky, Millikan, Brandom, and Stalnaker. Those are all great philosophers of language from roughly the 20th century.

Lots more opens up once philosophers start taking linguistics seriously. If you're a philosopher who wants to do philosophy of language, you need some familiarity with semantics. For that, Heim & Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar is the tops. There's so much good work on modality and conditionals from linguists and philosophers (Lewis, Kratzer, Yalcin, Stalnaker...too many to name, really), lots of work on contextualism in epistemology, entire literatures on small fragments of language, and so on. But the stuff I recommended above will get you acquainted with the classics.

u/Dokterrock · 14 pointsr/AskReddit

Let me cite that for you: The Unfolding of Language pp. 167-8. I read that book, too.

u/TimofeyPnin · 10 pointsr/conlangs

>The grammar simplifies itself the more people use it.

How are you defining grammar? I would highly recommend cracking a textbook on historical linguistics (Introduction to Historical Linguistics by Crowley and Bowern is great, as is Historical Linguistics by R.L. Trask).

You seem to be specifically referring to the tendency of highly synthetic languages to become more analytic over time -- but seem to be forgetting (or are unaware of) the fact that analytic languages become agglutinating and then synthetic over time. The whole process is referred to as the grammaticalization cycle.

>Language carries with it a certain amount of entropy; if it's taught properly it can maintain itself, but most people don't have the time or need.

Again, I highly recommend consulting an introductory textbook for historical linguistics.

>So gradually people start playing fast and loose with the syntax and what not.

This is flat-out wrong. Either of the books I mention above will explain why.

>Lexical complexity is only the result of introducing more words though conquest or immigration which is common enough but it doesn't happen on it's own.

This is also wrong. Seriously, both of the above books are great -- both are very readable, and Trask has the excellent quality of being charmingly (and intentionally) hilarious.

You're clearly interested in language, otherwise you wouldn't be posting in this subreddit. I think you'll find the scientific study of language to be incredibly interesting and fun -- and more rewarding than just positing unsubstantiated suppositions.

u/cairo140 · 9 pointsr/linguistics

From what I've heard, your best choice for an all-encompassing teach-yourself-linguistics book is the Language Files from Ohio State, which has a pretty big linguistics major.

If you want a more layman's introduction you can check out Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. The guy did a lecture at my school just yesterday, and he's quite good at explaining sociolinguistic concepts in everyday language. His current shtick is on analyzing language use. You can see a pretty cool video (an illustrated form of an excerpt from his current lecture) on Youtube.

If you want to go deeper, you might want to find book lists from a particular university. My university doesn't offer its lists publicly, but Ohio State does.

With a few exceptions (computational and certain sorts of applied linguistics like SLP), most linguistics graduate programs don't have specific technical expectations for students coming in. I'd just ask around. If you're picking a grad school, unless there's a compelling reason to stay close to home, you shouldn't be afraid to explore around the country. You'll end up getting paid pretty much the same amount anywhere if you're a linguistics grad student. My own school, Cornell University, has a lot of historical linguistics going on, especially Indo-Europeanist stuff, which you might be inclined to do as an anthropologist.

Finally, OCW has an abundance of linguistics courses available. Follow along with a few of those, although know that linguistics itself is a very diverse field that I can most closely analogize to biology. If you're studying pragmatics and sociolinguistics, you may do extremely well without ever knowing how to read a phonetic waveform. Just poke around and see what you like.

Do all that, and you'll be quite well prepared, and put a paper and a couple conferences under your belt as an undergraduate (at least in the Northeast, there are a few public undergraduate research conferences) and you should be no less prepared than your run-of-the-mill grad school-destined linguistics student.

u/CircleReversed · 9 pointsr/changemyview

There's a book you should read. It's called When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge.

Every language carries knowledge which is valuable to humanity for historical, anthropological, and even medical and environmental reasons. There are some languages spoken by a small number of indigenous people which carry information about medicinal herbs that the rest of the world is oblivious toward.

When languages are lost, all of the knowledge written down is lost, all of the history is lost. Look at Egypt; humans today only understand a fraction of the language of Ancient Egypt, which makes studying its history very difficult. Everything that happens in the world today is going to be valuable for future historians, and languages need to stay alive for history to stay alive.

And since people don't live forever, it's necessary for languages to be passed down to younger generations in order for the knowledge to remain accessible.

u/tendeuchen · 8 pointsr/linguistics

>increase my likelihood of getting hired abroad

Getting hired doing what? Where abroad?

Why do you want a minor in French? There are at least a few million other Haitians who are bilingual in French, so how are you bringing extra value to the marketplace with that minor? Wouldn't a Spanish/German/Russian/Chinese/etc. - Haitian bilingual be a rarer commodity?

This all really depends on where you want to go and what you want to do.

As for books:
My intro to ling. class used the book Language Files.
The Language Instinct is pretty good.
I really liked The Unfolding of Language.
The Power of Babel doesn't get too technical, but is an introduction to language change.

u/winnai · 8 pointsr/wikipedia

> What are they?

There are many - you can read about them in a grammar of AAVE the same way you can for English, French, Tok Pisin, British/American/Jamaican English, whatever.

u/nonara · 8 pointsr/Unexpected
u/Arminius99 · 8 pointsr/languagelearning

If you speak German, check out the EuroComRom website. If your German is not quite fluent, check out the English translation of the book The Seven Sieves: How To Read All The Romance Languages Right Away or simply have look at the multilingual Profilwortschatz and the Pan-Roman word list.

There's also the classic book The Loom of Language.

u/Posts_Relevant_Onion · 7 pointsr/AskHistorians

I'm afraid I can't answer your question directly, but I can help contextualize it historically and hopefully point you in the right direction.

Like u/ikid_ikid noted, the 6th century BCE didn't have strict national borders in the sense that we do nowadays. That part of India/Nepal was comprised of several smaller kingdoms, most notably for our purposes the Magadh. As you may know, the Buddha was born as a prince named Siddhartha in the Sakya clan (Sakyamuni translates roughly to 'sage of the Sakyas'). His hagiography depicts him as unusually skilled in many areas, including language, and this certainly would have helped him reach a larger audience in his teachings. It's also worth pointing out that, after his enlightenment at age 35, he taught for 45 years before his death. That's a long time, and despite the fact that he travelled by foot he was pretty mobile. If you look at this slightly cluttered map of the important sites in his life, you see how active he was.

However, Sakyamuni Buddha was not the only person who spread Buddhism. Far from it. To understand how Buddhism spread so quickly throughout northern India (and eventually much of South and SE Asia) let's look at two important factors. The first is the First Buddhist Council, which convened the year after Sakyamuni died. The council, comprised of 500 arhats (englightened ones, who had been taught by the Buddha or his close disciples) convened and standardized many of the monastic rules and teachings of the Buddha (Pali: dhamma, Sanskrit: dharma). With everyone on (theoretically) the same page, the arhats could spread the Buddhadhamma wherever they went.

The second important factor is the reign of King Asoka pdf, in the 3rd century BCE. Asoka was arguably India's greatest king ever, and he was the first ruler to unify most of the Indian Subcontinent. And he was a Buddhist. (Actually there's some speculation about his personal beliefs, but certainly promoted Buddhism as a matter of state). This was great news for Buddhism, which was popular but still relatively local and competing against plenty of other religions (Jainism, Ajivikia, the Brahmanism that would eventually become hinduism, to name a few). Asoka event sent his daughter to Sri Lanka, and established Buddhism there.

In my opinion, the First Buddhist Council and the reign of Asoka are the most important factors in understanding how Buddhism spread the way it did. However, there are plenty of other factors that I won't go into here. For example, if we look into the suttas in the Pali Canon, we see thatthe Buddha was extremely well-connected in his lifetime. This is not only due to his royal lineage but also to his wealthy and powerful lay disciples such as King Bimbisara. On a more societal level, the Buddha lived in a time of great social upheaval and urbanization. This may have lead to an increase in mobility and openmindedness that he might have made use of. Finally, if you want to get supernatural, the suttas often mention that the Buddha had 84,000 teachings -- which we might read as an arbitrarily high number -- for any individual's abilities and disposition. He also had plenty of "magical" powers. Though I don't specifically know if these allegedly allowed him to communicate using other languages, I would not be surprised to learn that they do.

As for sources, I apologize because I do not have my books with me at the moment. I've also taken some of this information from undergrad lectures, and therefore don't have specific references for them. As to general readings, I highly suggest reading suttas from the Pali Canon. The collection edited and translated by Rupert Gethin is the best I've read, and the preface in particular addresses some of what I've discussed. Gombrich's book about Asoka is very well-respected, as is Conze's introction to early Buddhism.

u/Kinbensha · 7 pointsr/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu

I'm not sure what you're saying here. If you're confused about linguistics, I suggest reading Language Files.

u/ilmrynorlion · 7 pointsr/askphilosophy

I highly recommend this book by Scott Soames. Couple that with reading the seminal papers by Frege, Russell, P.F. Strawson and the others that are cited in the text (the papers recommended in the /r/philosophy reading list are all worth reading).

u/kingkayvee · 7 pointsr/linguistics

This question has been asked before, so I recommend doing some searches on the sub.

The general summary is: we don't really know. There are various theories out there as to the origins of AAE. All of them have merits but also have biases. You can read about this on the AAVE wiki page.

A great book on AAE is Green's African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. I'm pretty sure the "Look inside" feature will let you read the preface "On accounting for the origin of AAE."

u/CoconutDust · 6 pointsr/linguistics

"A way to intensity what you're saying" is your analysis or interpretation, and might not be correct. You should be careful not to jump to conclusions about the meaning of the construction.

In accordance with the other person's comment, which seems to nail it, the construction seems related more to expressing or beckoning familiarity rather than "more intensity".

Also, it has probably been popularized by rap and AAVE, given a new art, given a new life. So if you hear it more lately, that's probably due to cultural influence or momentum. But that's different than the construction itself "coming from" the dialect. Whereas, there are many great [other] expressions that entirely originate in African American English.

African American English: A Linguistic Introduction by Lisa Green is my go-to reference, but it was published before the rise of Twitter and doesn't contain reference to this use of "that".

u/WsThrowAwayHandle · 6 pointsr/TumblrInAction

Well, the word "articulate" might have connotations.

If you're not aware of them, that's fine. This is something new to you, and now you're aware of it.

But arguing that those connotations don't exist, or they shouldn't be taken into consideration when such a word is said, well, that's a bit much.

u/Dh_Jayarava · 5 pointsr/Buddhism

Highlights from my library...

At introductory level, Skilton A Concise History of Buddhism is a good overview of Buddhism from an historical perspective.

Foundations of Buddhism by Rupert Gethin is a fairly good modern overview of Buddhist ideas.

Kalupahana A history of Buddhist philosophy - slightly eccentric, but some excellent coverage of Buddhist thought. Stops short of Tantra. However, supplement with Samuel The Origins of Yoga and Tantra.

Snellgrove Indo-Tibetan Buddhism covers late Mahāyāna and Tantra; theory oriented. Perhaps a but dated now, but non-sectarian.

For early Buddhist texts, Gethin's selections from the Pāḷi Canon is probably a better bet than Bodhi's massive tome. It is more focussed. If you get into Pāli Suttas then get the Nikāya translations, starting with Majjhima Nikāya (the most readable). Another lesser know anthology is by Glenn Wallis Basic Teachings of the Buddha. Slightly idiosyncratic, but a very interesting perspective.

For a traditional anthology of Mahāyāna texts try the much neglected Śikṣamuccaya by Śāntideva (8th Century). I have a different edition to this link, so maybe look around.

Tantra doesn't lend itself to anthologies. I think probably the best introduction to Tantra is Hakeda Kūkai: Major Works, though it may not entirely stand alone, you'll at least know what the right questions are. I've never found any book by a Tibetan Buddhist to rival Kūkai for clarity of exposition about what Tantra Buddhism is.

In terms of practice, Buddhism is often sharply divided by sectarianism and so books on practice tend to be narrowly focussed along sectarian lines. And even on single practices within sects (such as books on Theravāda approaches to breath meditation only; Zen approaches to koan practice and so on.). Note that having asked for a comprehensive book, most of the suggestions are sectarian and ignore centuries of development of Buddhism in other directions.

Buddhism also often suffers from a theory/practice disconnect. A lot of our theory/doctrine has no practical application; while some of our practices are poorly understood and communicated.

The fact is that if you take one sect at a starting point, you will find much of what you learn contradicted when you shift to a different sectarian point of view. Sects tend to present their sectarian point of view as Buddhism without ever letting on that other brands are available. So a comprehensive outline of Buddhism is almost impossible without fudging a lot of conflict and contradiction.




u/millionsofcats · 5 pointsr/linguistics

You're making a lot of faulty assumptions about what I have (or would have) learned in school, and I don't think it's helping at all.

Also, I don't need someone to explain to me the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. I'm trying to get describe your class and the difficulties you're having, so I can make a helpful recommendation.

> is there a grammarian who has his own definition of what a determiner is

Certainly, those working on l syntax can have different interpretations of the syntactic categories in a language, c.f. whether pronouns are a type of determiner. It can also depend on the perspective; a pedogogical grammar might call words like my "possessive adjectives" rather than "possessive determiners". How you're expected to identify determiners might vary by class - e.g. whether you're supposed to know certain tests, or memorize a list. Whether you're expected to be able to identify determiners in languages other than English also matters.

You asked for textbooks on "descriptive grammar" and all I've been trying to do is to get more specific out of you so I can decide if you want something like The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language or something like the syntax chapter of Language Files. If your response is to assume that I'm asking you questions because I'm confused about fundamental concepts in linguistics, then I can't really help you.

u/merthsoft · 5 pointsr/askscience

The Pirahã kind of don't. I mean, they certainly like to be happy, but it's very different from American happiness, and they also really really value being "tough" at the sake of happiness. For example, they often go hungry even though there's food enough for them to eat. Their culture is really neat, and I suggest picking up Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.

u/l33t_sas · 4 pointsr/linguistics

I think others here have made a decent case for the value language conservation provides to linguistic theory, but the replies have been scant on the value these languages have towards their communities. I recommend you check out When Languages Die by K. David Harrison (he's also made a documentary, The Linguists which is nice too). Also check out Dying Words by the aforementioned Nick Evans (I'm meeting him in a few weeks, so excited!). I also recommend joining the Resource Network For Linguistic Diversity on Facebook as well as the open-access online journal Language Documentation and Conservation.

u/nerga · 4 pointsr/cringe

This might help you out.

u/languagejones · 4 pointsr/linguistics

It sounds like a good introduction to Phonetics and Phonology might be of interest to you. This is the one I first used.

u/mikelevins · 4 pointsr/gamedev

I invent a naming language.

For my high-fantasy game world I took the time to sit down with the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Encyclopedia-Language-David-Crystal/dp/0521736501) and the Zompist site (http://www.zompist.com/resources/) and build a set of naming languages. Then I wrote a program that uses the rules that I distilled to generate names.

For a far-future science-fiction setting where player characters are artificial intelligences, I came up with a scheme for mapping bytes to components of names, and wrote a program to generate 64-bit names.

If you're a programmer, it's pretty easy to write programs that generate names, if you have a general idea of what you want the names to look like. You can do it several ways:

  • travesty generators, like Dissociated Press (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travesty_generator)

  • Markov chains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_generators)

  • rule-driven generators (make a table that encodes the rules that names have to follow and randomly choose elements that follow the rules)

    If you use generated names, you have to do some tuning and selection because occasionally you'll get really terrible ones. I don't find the tuning onerous because the testing usually ends up making me laugh. All of the above types of generators can generate some hilarious names.

u/ladyhollyhock · 3 pointsr/linguistics

This is the book my Introduction to Linguistics class used. On the plus side, it's really accessible and explains a lot of the 'main' areas of linguistics fairly well. On the other hand, as a phonetics fiend even as a beginner, I was less than impressed by its representation of IPA (I was already fairly proficient in it from vocal training).

I also strongly suggest checking out university linguistics labs' research pages as the labs often post .pdfs of student and faculty research!

u/UsesBigWords · 3 pointsr/askphilosophy

I think Soames and Lycan's books are pretty good.

u/Rodstewartswig · 3 pointsr/samharris

Yeah, I don't think Chomsky has written in depth about this, but obviously he'd be alive to the risk of naturalistic fallacy. He praises this 2011 book, exploring the topic -

https://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Moral-Cognition-Linguistic-Cognitive/dp/0521855780

u/TheNonCompliant · 3 pointsr/TrollXChromosomes

Same!!! You might like The Loom of Language by Bodmer and The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by Anthony, if you haven’t read them already.

u/KaramQa · 3 pointsr/Buddhism

Books of anybody named Gethin are not the primary religious texts in Buddhism. There is a Rupert Gethin thats written books about Buddhism though, according to Google.

I think this must be it
https://www.amazon.com/Sayings-Buddha-Translations-Nikayas-Classics/dp/019283925X

u/dont_press_ctrl-W · 3 pointsr/linguistics

The sociological notion of a community of practice might be useful here. Basically a CoP is A) a relatively stable group of people that B) get together on a relatively regular basis in order to C) do some relatively stable thing together.

It is common since the late nineties in sociolinguistics to study one particular CoPs linguistic particularities with the understanding that language is one dimension through which the CoP will define itself. In practice CoPs studied in sociolinguistics tend to explore interactions of language with gender and racial dynamics, e.g. black women in Appalachia, high school nerd girls, Latina gangs... but in theory a CoP doesn't have to involve power dynamics.

So to answer your question, I think one would talk of a language variety specific to a family as a community of practice (or perhaps more accurately a community of place). There isn't be a specific term for it as far as I know.

u/xugan97 · 2 pointsr/Buddhism

You might want to read just one of the four Nikayas, or an anthology like Sayings of the Buddha or In the Buddha's words.

On the Mahayana side, it is better to start with the books of modern teachers like others have recommended. My personal recommendations are any book by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche and "The method of no method" by Chan master Sheng Yen. Mahayana sutras can be underwhelming or confusing to the beginner - I can recommend the Prajnaparamita sutra (i.e. the Diamond sutra or a longer version.)

u/trolls_brigade · 2 pointsr/Romania

Here is a good start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#History

>Inconsistencies and irregularities in English pronunciation and spelling have gradually increased in number throughout the history of the English language. There are a number of contributing factors. First, gradual changes in pronunciation, such as the Great Vowel Shift, account for a tremendous number of irregularities. Second, relatively recent loan words from other languages generally carry their original spellings, which are often not phonetic in English.

>The regular spelling system of Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest, and English itself was supplanted in some spheres by Norman French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, which naturally kept their French spellings as there was no reason or mechanism to change them.

This book was recommended in another thread:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521736501


u/lafayette0508 · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

If you haven't heard of it, I recommend you read the book "Articulate While Black," by Smitherman and Alim. Great sociolinguistic research (but written in an accessible way to non-linguistics) that deals with exactly these issues, and especially the compliment of "being articulate." (PS: as a sociolinguist, I endorse your comment. It's exactly the right answer.)

u/Clbrosch · 2 pointsr/printSF

It sounds a bit like Little Fuzzy followed by the sequel Fuzzy Sapiens

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Fuzzy-Sapiens-Book-ebook/dp/B0082T1G7C

Little Fuzzy is a 1962 juvenile science fiction novel by H. Beam Piper, now in public domain. It was nominated for the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

The story revolves around determining whether a small furry species discovered on the planet Zarathustra is sapient, and features a mild libertarianism that emphasizes sincerity and honesty

u/tgruff77 · 2 pointsr/suggestmeabook

The Language Files is a fairly standard beginning linguistics textbook. I used it when I taught an introduction to linguistics course. Of course, it might be too much of a textbook for you.


https://www.amazon.com/Language-Files-Materials-Introduction-Linguistics-dp-0814252702/dp/0814252702/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

u/smokeshack · 2 pointsr/languagelearning

The academic discipline is called phonology. If you're the sort of person who enjoys rule-based games, like RPGs and board games, I think you'll find it a lot of fun. I like the book Introducing Phonetics and Phonology by Davenport and Hannahs as an introductory text. You need a basic background in phonetics to do phonology, and this text gives it to you.

u/xolsiion · 2 pointsr/Fantasy

> I think it still holds up as an examination of what it means to be a person.

Agreed. Should have mentioned this too. I think I got mine for free from amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Fuzzy-Sapiens-Book-ebook/dp/B0082T1G7C/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=little+fuzzy+piper&qid=1555953262&s=gateway&sr=8-1

u/imaskingwhy · 2 pointsr/AskAcademia

I'll echo the obvious: linguistics. "A Very Short Introduction" would be good, as would be "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language" ( http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Encyclopedia-Language-David-Crystal/dp/0521736501 ).

I started getting interested in linguistics very young (beginning at 4, then with much more interest in high school when I began to take German). Now I'm in an MA program in Linguistics and am aiming for a Ph.D. to be a professor in the field. Enjoy!

u/oneguy2008 · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

There are many good analytic introductions to philosophy of language, including Martinich and Sosa and Soames.

u/INTPLibrarian · 2 pointsr/linguistics

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language is actually very readable even though it's an "encyclopedia." Probably not exactly what you were looking for, but I'd suggest taking a look at it. It's expensive, but perhaps a local library has it.

u/lillesvin · 2 pointsr/linguistics

There are plenty of good introductory books around. From the top of my head:

u/Stargaters · 2 pointsr/linguistics

I'm going to reply to this in a rather obtuse and general manner and just link with as many resources as I can, as I don't currently have time to fully explore the subject, and I'm not overly familiar with the philosophy of language and/or communication studies.

As to your opening comments, "how communication takes place and forms" makes me think you'd be really interested in Conversational Analysis - this Wiki article sources a lot of excellent resources.

  1. Yes, of course, we both study language. I'm sorry I can't speak overly to specifics here, I don't know exactly where they intersect. I would guess somewhere in the Anthropological Ling, CogSci, or Sociolinguistics specializations, though I could most definitely be wrong here.

  2. Pragmatics and Semantics are your best bets here, and likely the Conversation Analysis page I've already linked.

  3. Wiki has an OK overview, but to me it has always seemed very fragmented and confusing. The Linguistics Society of America has a good Why Should I Major in Linguistics? page, though I'm not sure it's exactly what you're looking for. There is also this Linguistics Careers PDF that I stumbled across a while back that might have some useful info for you. Honestly, taking an Intro to Ling class is a good place to start if you're interested, as it's about the only way to really get a good grasp. You could also try just buying a textbook for a Ling 101 class, or browsing a nearby (University) Library's linguistics section. If you want a book, the most basic overview I can find on my shelf (most of the classes I take now are very specialized) is The Linguistic Wars, which does a good job of summing up the last 50 years of Linguistics in a decently accessible format without going overboard. David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language is also interesting, but it's not really a page turner IMO. Encyclopedia is the right word.

    I'd be happy to answer more questions if you have any, though I am sorry I am not more familiar with Communication Studies and Philosophy of Language.
u/Fasach · 2 pointsr/linguistics

What do you think interests you most about language? Someone might be able to recommend something more specific then. Anyway, I'd recommend familiarising yourself with the IPA system first. It's a fun way to start just by transcribing your own speech and becoming aware of the huge number of sounds we're able to produce.

If you'd like a book recommendation, I used this one in a foundations course at Uni. I found it really useful and the concepts were easy to grasp. It'll also give you a good, general idea of the areas within linguistics.

u/grahamiam · 2 pointsr/AdviceAnimals

Entire book about this. Good read, even though it's pretty academic (and thus annoying to read). http://www.amazon.com/Articulate-While-Black-Barack-Language/dp/0199812985

u/SewHappyGeek · 1 pointr/AskUK

My experience was a bit weird because for the first few years I was spending around 1/3 or 1/2 of the year in the US, then the rest in the UK. So my accent didn't start to change till relatively recently. In the past few years I've spent all my time here, and I guess after about a year I started to soften my 'r' and harden my 't'. Then the words I used frequently started changing and I started using the 'ah' in the middle of words. Now it's a really fucked up hybrid of both, so my family thinks I'm full on English sounding - and they comment on it. But English people here know I'm not English. They're just never very sure where I'm from so they have to ask.

However, I must admit that in formal situations I have learned to sound as English as possible - so ordering food, asking for directions, post office, etc. I suspect this is because I'm always aware I'm different and I get really fucking tired of people bitching about American policy or just being obnoxious about what part of the States I'm from (No, it's not near Florida. Yes, I've been to Fla. no, I don't like it there. Ugh!). So to avoid that, my brain automatically goes into formal gear. When I'm with friends I sound more Yank. When my daughter and I speak we fall back into a pattern of very fast Yank-speak.

I'm sure you could learn an accent without knowing Phonetics, but the phonetics will make it easier because it provides a framework for understanding sounds. Try an intro book like this one and you'll soon find the symbols make it way easier to understand. I haven't done much academic stuff in a while, but when I did it and my hearing was good I could 'see' the sounds people were making using the IPA in my head while they were talking. Very useful for imitation!

u/Epistechne · 1 pointr/linguistics

I'm not educated in linguistics but I try to collect textbooks on each subject. I haven't read it yet but I'll share that this was the intro book I was thinking about getting: http://www.amazon.com/Linguistics-Introduction-Communication-Adrian-Akmajian/dp/0262513706

u/thegirlwthemjolnir · 1 pointr/asklinguistics

If you need the super basics, there is Linguistics for dummies. Here.

I have the PDF if you need it and can’t find it, hit my inbox.

u/MuskratRambler · 1 pointr/linguistics

If you mean get into, as in you want to be interested but just can't find the motivation, what got me interested was reading about it. Learn from the best. Here are some good ones on documentation itself (I guess more on the eminence of languages dying and the need for documentation):

  • Linguistic Fieldwork—Claire Bowern

  • When Languages DieDavid Harrison

  • Vanishing Voices—Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine

  • Endangered Languages—Sarah G. Thomason

    Fieldwork is often closely associated with typology, so here are some books that explain some of what's possible in the world's languages:

  • Describing Morphosyntax—Thomas Payne

  • Ergativity—R.M.W. Dixon

  • Changing Valency—R.M.W. Dixon & Alexandra Aikhenvald

    And then there are reference grammars, often the fruits of fieldwork. Here are some good ones I've gone through:

  • A Grammar of Tariana—Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

  • A Grammar of Hup—Patience Epps

  • Basically any other one in the Mouton Grammar Library, plus here are some free ones from Language Science Press.

    Then again, if you mean get into it meaning what language should you pick and what part of the world, that's a harder question to answer. I feel like languages just sort of happen to people: they know someone who happens to come from a community of minority language speakers, or they have a friend who says they ran into an understudied language while abroad, or you yourself happened to live in that part of the world for whatever reason. It's hard to go study a language out of the blue because you need an "in" somehow, which is hard to purposely get, I think.
u/city_lights · 1 pointr/Anthropology

Homegirls by Norma Mendoza-Denton is pretty good, I just read it for a cultural/linguistic anthro class.

u/spiphy · 1 pointr/offbeat

People need to read The unfolding of language.
Language is constantly changing, to fight against it is madness.

u/kison213 · 1 pointr/textbookrequest

i have this book
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814252702/ref=cm_sw_su_dp
if that what u looking for talk to me

u/FunUniverse1778 · 1 pointr/askphilosophy

Right. I agree. I was thinking of "investigation" in a deeper sense of something more rigorous. Obviously we could talk about what's right/wrong right now, without any theory.

Would you agree that these theory-neutral investigations would not be useful if the other person doesn't accept your bedrock framework?

We probably have moral rules built into our brains, but I think that it would be confusing to consider that a "theory," because usually we have in mind something deliberate/conscious/intellectual when we say "theory."

Can we have complicated intellectual models in our minds that are unconscious? Chomsky notes that the vast majority of thought/thinking/decision-making is unconscious, but to say unconscious "theory" is confusing to me because it makes me think that you have like "Darwin's theory of evolution" in your subconscious, which is weird.

Mikhail writes here about rules in our brains, subconscious, but they aren't theory, I don't think:

>Is the science of moral cognition usefully modeled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate "moral grammar" that causes them to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyze human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgment. The book will be of interest to philosophers, cognitive scientists, legal scholars, and other researchers in the interdisciplinary field of moral psychology.

Mikhail tinkers the thought-experiments to show all the sophisticated unconscious judgments that people make that the people themselves can't explain (of course), but that show deep moral principles. I'm not sure how much people differ on these principles.

You and I could "investigate" a Trolly Problem scenario and debate it, without any theory, but what if we disagree on a fundamental value? Then don't I need to construct (and argue for) and underlying theory that supports my value, or else we're at an impasse?

(I was also curious about impasses regarding rationality too, but that's a different topic.)

u/cellrunetry · 1 pointr/linguistics

I can only speak for hist ling, but I've loved Trask's - detailed and the exercises can be challenging. I used Crowley/Bowern's in a class and found it a bit slower with not all the information you might want, though there are tons of examples from non-IE languages which is nice. Judging by Amazon another favorite seems to be Campbell's, though I don't have experience with it. I think all of these books would require some prior work in phonology/phonetics, though nothing you couldn't pick soon enough (they might even have a refresher sections, I can't recall).

u/tbone13billion · 1 pointr/southafrica

I love languages, and love to read about them, even if not to learn them. One of my favourite books is called "The Loom of Language" (https://www.amazon.com/Loom-Language-Approach-Mastery-Languages/dp/039330034X)

I would absolutely love to read something similar for Xhosa or Zulu, any recommendations? I have looked before, but haven't really found anything.

u/bigbadathabaskanverb · 1 pointr/linguistics

My intro grad class read the following, so I think they're a good place to start:

The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice

https://www.amazon.com/Green-Book-Language-Revitalization-Practice/dp/9004254498

Saving Languages

https://www.amazon.com/Saving-Languages-Introduction-Language-Revitalization/dp/0521016525/ref=pd_sbs_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=DXKK7FQ77XYXCPQWPVM9

Reversing Language Shift

https://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Language-Shift-Theoretical-Multilingual/dp/1853591211/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480605154&sr=1-1&keywords=reversing+language+shift

When Languages Die

https://www.amazon.com/When-Languages-Die-Extinction-Knowledge/dp/0195372069/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480605172&sr=1-1&keywords=when+languages+die

In addition to many articles, but if it's articles you want, you can't go wrong with anything by Leanne Hinton.

If all you know right now is that you think you're interested in Endangered Languages, then read read read is really the best advice, so you can get an idea of what "the field" entails and start to find what interests you. What part of the world? What language family? What type of work - applied and/or academic? Are you interested more in documentation, description, or revitalization based work (most projects involve all three, but usually weighted a bit more toward one or the other)? And what subfield of linguistics do you want to specialize in? etc.

u/polareclipse · 1 pointr/linguistics

I recommend Language Files written by the faculty at the Ohio State University. It was my intro to linguistics book and it offers a very general yet thorough survey of all of the sub-fields of linguistics. It really is a fantastic book and I reference it frequently. Older editions will do if you are on a budget.

You could go Pinker, you could go Lagefoged, but really you're only going to be scratching the surface of very specific areas that way. Books like Pinker's are great for getting your mind wandering about language, though.

u/hurrayforzac · 1 pointr/linguistics

found this:

http://www.amazon.com/Linguistics-Sixth-Introduction-Language-Communication/dp/0262513706/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302124934&sr=8-1#reader_0262513706

features the basic stuff, free to read. usually classes teach phonetics first, not morphology, so maybe you could read them out of order. i haven't read that book but it looks good.

u/El_Predsjednik · 1 pointr/conlangs

Yeah, looking back at that thread some of the complaints are pretty stupid IMO. But the LCK is still a good book to start off with.

You might also want to check out its sequel, Advanced Language Construction. It's pretty good and covers some other interesting topics like creoles, sign languages, and NW Caucasian verbs.

u/Jonlang_ · 1 pointr/conlangs

Go and buy these three books: The Language Construction Kit, Advanced Language Construction (don't worry, it's not that advanced), and The Conlanger's Lexipedia. And if your conlangs are designed for made-up worlds, then get [The Planet Construction Kit] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Planet-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/0984470034/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=W79ND56BKPK8EKXT2VQZ) too. If you want to make cultures that are not European then I'd also suggest The China Construction Kit!

Of all of these I'd suggest that you definitely buy The Language Construction Kit and see how you get on. I'd also suggest buying some grammar books of languages you're interested in, and even go so far as to learn a second language if you don't speak one. Having knowledge of at least one other language will help you a great deal.

u/LukeStarkiller · 1 pointr/biology

I highly recommend picking up "The Unfolding of Language". Not sure if you can get it/read it in time to help you on your paper, but it's a really great book on the evolution of language and where certain words came from, cool things like that. I loved it. Here's the Amazon link

u/jsoaon · 1 pointr/chomsky
u/pyry · 1 pointr/linguistics

For AAVE, there's this book. It's awesome and very descriptive, too.

u/OnToNextStage · 0 pointsr/HitBoxPorn

I don't know why it would come across like that. The facts are the ones you choose to ignore here because it conflicts with something you were taught years ago. If you want to know some actual facts read a book like this one.

But without actually taking the time to study the field why would you think you have the facts? It seems to me more like something challenged what you believed to be true and you got incensed over it.

u/jordanlund · 0 pointsr/scifi

Do yourself a favor, read this public domain book called "Little Fuzzy":

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Fuzzy-Sapiens-Book-ebook/dp/B0082T1G7C

Then hunt down Scalzi's reboot authorized by the original author's estate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_Nation