(Part 2) Top products from r/linguistics

My life would be amazing if I wasn't a huge pedant, but I'm going to go another round on this. Hopefully we can close this discussion afterwards.

Let's start at the beginning. You say:

>The present day surfice forms are actually identical in Slavic and proto- Dravidian/Tamil 'kur-u' and 'kur-va' "voice" resp. "voice-less".

Right. But the other examples you've cited aren't at all identical, and so my previous description of your phonetic basis for these relationships is more or less correct, right? Or are we down to just these Slavic examples now?

If so, you should realize that most languages share at least a few sounds (the /k/ and /u/ sound being present in the vast majority of the world's languages, and some sort of rhotic r-like sound in a fair share as well). Given the enormous number of words needed in most languages, and the limited set of phonetically possible words in most languages, there's going to be many unrelated languages that have a few similar or identical words. I believe it's John McWhorter, in some recent editions of his book The Power of Babel, who provides a lengthy list of words which have similar form and meaning but which come from demonstrably unrelated languages, or which can be shown to have formed recently, by coincidence. He does this specifically to explain why this isn't a reliable way of showing that languages are related.

>I don't have a theory, it's a sound and meaning comparison with some analogies.

Then what have we been discussing for the past few days? You've been fairly intensely debating with me (and now a few other people, it seems) to prove that there's a relationship between a very specific set of languages, based on a very specific set of words which appear similar. You started this thread by saying that people should more commonly acknowledge that Tamil influenced PIE. Both of these would be theories. That's why we're having this discussion. If you have no opinion on this matter, why have you been defending it?

For what it's worth, my understanding of your most recent theory is that it's this:

• You believe that Indo-European languages, some Uralic languages, and the Dravidian languages share a relatively recent common ancestor. This ancestor is recent enough that the relationship can be demonstrated by a number of words in European languages and Sanskrit which resemble the Tamil word kuru in meaning and shape. Across these languages, this root has been realized in numerous different ways, often with meanings relating to bird, voice or a derogatory term.
  
  If I'm wrong on the details, correct me, but regardless, that's a theory, and a big one. This discussion has been going on for quite a while and it's all here on this thread if you want to review. It really doesn't look like you're just presenting a collection of comparisons, but that you're trying to argue for a specific thesis about the reason for these comparisons.
  
  On the other hand, if you're trying to say that you don't support those points I've listed above anymore, that's fine. But if you've backed away from your hypothesis in light of what's been said here, it would behoove you to graciously admit your evidence isn't as strong as you'd initially assumed. Pretending that you've not actually been promoting this theory is a pretty weak way out.
  
  Now, let's get back to the discussion.
  
  >The historical reconstruction of 'guru' to PIE heavy is a formal reconstruction and there is no meaningful semantic link behind it while this is not the case if we accept there was a common shared Eurasian ancestor between IE and Dravidian languages claimed by the study.
  
  I believe I've provided evidence here that guru was understood to be an ordinary word for "heavy" in Sanskrit, even at the time in which its other, better-known, meaning was coined.
  
  >However the study does not by default acknowledge linguistic historical reconstruction (often contradictory and highly hypothetical for a variety of reasons) to be 100% precise but does provide for and give green light for searching cross-family references no matter what some linguists think.
  
  First of all, no one thinks that we shouldn't be searching for cross-family references. Linguists are constantly trying to prove that languages are related in larger and larger families. The proposed Dene-Yeniseian family is one of the more interesting larger families to be well-received recently, though it's not yet consistently regarded as having been proven. The problem is that linguists require really, really solid scientific proof. And since you're on /r/linguistics, it might suit you to get less defensive when people ask for it from you (though I apologize about the people who are just acting like assholes instead of contributing actual points - they weren't my doing).
  
  Second, even if we do accept the study as valid (which I don't) it makes very specific claims about what sort of words are habitually "ultraconserved" and should be used as evidence for "deep language ancestry". It doesn't even remotely suggest that any pair of similar sounding words would constitute this kind of evidence. Frankly, your examples don't seem to fall within the scope of its very narrow claims.
  
  I do want to acknowledge that it is absolutely true that we "might as well explore the hypothesis of [a] Eurasian common linguistic superfamily". Linguists have been debating many hypotheses for what this - or other, non-Eurasian superfamilies - could look like for years. That's not an issue. The issue is that I don't think that the evidence you're presenting demonstrates any linguistic superfamily. I think it's better explained by the current etymologies we already have, not the ones your propose. I also think there's no Tamil influence on PIE, and that Proto-Dravidian and PIE, if related, are removed by too much time and history to demonstrate a linkage by pointing to a tiny set of similar words. Those are points that I've been trying to make for some time now, and it seems like I'm getting a lot of agreement on them from others - no surprise, as they're what pretty much any linguist would think.
  
  As for the "contradictory and highly hypothetical" nature of linguistic reconstruction, that's not really the case either. While there's debate about the validity of certain proposed families (e.g. Altaic), the debate stems from issues around insufficient data, or proposals that suggest relationships across very long periods of time, to a degree in which we can no longer accurately trace the sound changes which must have occurred. No one doubts the accuracy of reconstruction as a method, just its applicability to certain cases.
  
  Over appropriate periods of time, and with enough data, linguistic reconstruction is remarkably accurate. I've referenced this briefly before, but the PIE laryngeals are a great example. Saussure, one of the fathers of modern linguistics, suggested in 1879 that PIE had a certain set of sounds which hadn't survived into any descendant language, based on evidence from sound correspondences across modern Indo-European languages (this is the kind of data standard reconstruction methods use). Sure enough, when we discovered a previously unknown ancient Indo-European language, Hittite, decades later, we found direct evidence that PIE had sounds in the positions predicted by Saussure based on evidence from one of the oldest Indo-European languages we'd ever seen. Essentially, rather than being "hypothetical" or "speculative", the present understanding is that linguistic reconstruction is demonstrably accurate enough to predict how data from languages we've never seen will look.
  
  Unfortunately for your theory, it's your evidence that's "highly speculative". The only third party evidence is a forum posting which even you have discredited now, and a study which doesn't really have all that much to do with your theory. Basically, you have no real scientific evidence to support your point. The current reconstructions for these words have a much greater weight of real, scientific evidence behind them.
  
  This is a forum about a science called linguistics. I certainly don't think anyone needs to be interested in linguistics. But if you're posting on this forum, there's a reasonable expectation that everyone else is interested in linguistics and knowledgeable of the field. Getting annoyed because people with knowledge of the field disagree with you based on this science is basically the definition of "butt hurt".
  
  TL;DR No tl;dr. Read it.

I would read some more "casual" or pop linguistics books to really cement your interest in linguistics before any of the more heady pieces of literature scare you off. As a side note, I'd learn the English IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) chart before you pursue further literature. Not knowing would be like performing math calculations without knowing what any of the operator signs were. As a high schooler, this is your time to read. God knows you won't have as much time to do it in college. Only after you get a general feel for what linguists actually do and study, would I recommend making a choice, it's certainly not for everyone :)

Great story demonstrating just how different certain languages can be.
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335511683&sr=8-1

If you want a great pop introduction that'll really help you tap your toe on the vast ocean surface known as linguistics, I'd give this a try too http://www.amazon.com/The-Stuff-Thought-Language-Window/dp/0143114247/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335511905&sr=1-2

If you like what you read, and think it would be admirable to contribute to the swiftly growing pool of knowledge we currently have in this wonderful field, then pursue more academically oriented sources, and as others said, maybe narrow your interests further by contacting a certain professor or researcher. Hope this helped :)

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 Die—David 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.

As far as I know, the most popular introductory textbook is Fromkin's. You can get an older edition for cheaper. I studied with the 5th edition less than 3 years ago and it was fine. For something less unwieldy and more practical to carry around with you, Barry Blake's All About Language is really good. Less than 300 pages and manages to cover a huge amount of stuff clearly.

Personally, I think that historical linguistics is a really fun and relatively easy way to get into Linguistics as a whole so I'd recommend Trask's Historical Linguistics. I know that the Campbell and Crowley textbooks are also very popular, but I don't have personal experience with them. Maybe somebody else can weigh in on which is easiest for a beginner?

I have to plug my professor Kate Burridge here who has written some excellent pop-linguistics books: Gifts of the Gob, Weeds in the Garden of Words and Blooming English. Her more serious books are also written in a highly accessible manner and she is probably one of the world's experts on Euphemism and taboo. Here's a clip of her in action.

Some fun linguistics-related videos:

TED - The Uncanny Science of Linguistic Reconstruction

Pinker on Swearing

David Crystal on British tv

Another fun way to learn would be to listen to this song and look up all the terms used in it.

The NLTK book is a good hands-on free introduction that doesn't require you to understand a whole lot of math.

Other than that, the "big two" textbooks are:

• Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky & Martin (there are some chapter drafts from the upcoming 3rd edition here!
  
• Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing by Manning & Schutze
  
  They're a lot more math-heavy than the NLTK book, but if you're interested in computational linguistics/NLP, then your math and statistics should be solid.
  
  Honorable mention:
  
  
• Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing by Emily Bender aims to give an overview of stuff from pen-and-paper linguistics that are good to know in the computational linguistics world.
  
  Hope this helps!

Language Myths could be a good start. It's a collection of essays written by linguists about some common misconceptions about language and how it works. It covers some really common myths, such as the "Eskimo language has thousands of words for snow" nonsense, and covers some sociolinguistic things like people's perception of language and the idea of prestige. It's written for people without a linguistics background.

If you would prefer something more akin to a university introduction course in linguistics rather than a coffee table book, try reading Language Files. Personally, I think it's a little too shallow, even for an introduction, but maybe you'd like it.

If you'd like to save the effort and money and just read Wikipedia pages, there are a ton of relevant ones.

Descriptivism

Problems with Prescriptivism

Sociolinguistics

Prestige

Dialect

Or, a single person's dialect: Idiolect

Sociolects

Some dialects of English that some people might consider "incorrect":

African American English Vernacular

Chicano English

Hiberno-English

Jamaican English

Standard Singaporean English

If you have any more questions, please let me know. I'd be more than happy to do anything I can to help.

If you're interested (especially) in why people "do the things they do," I recommend Ray Jackendoff - Patterns in the Mind, as well as pretty much any Steven Pinker book you can get your hands on -- The Blank Slate was an excellent read that goes well beyond basic linguistics as well. These two are some of my favorite "layman" authors for psycholinguistics. Enjoy!

I'll second the recommendation of The Language Instinct. Pinker approaches it from the perspective of a cognitive scientist, but it's a good book if you want an overview of linguistics and linguistic theory (although some of his claims are controversial and as breads mentioned, it's somewhat outdated).

As for English syntax, I don't think there are any books out there intended for the layman, so your best bet would probably be to pick up an introductory textbook with a syntax unit. I'd recommend Language Files from the Ohio State University Press. It's an excellent and comprehensive introductory text, one of the best.

An Introduction to Language by Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams is also well-regarded, but I haven't taught from it, so I can't speak to it personally.

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.

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).

I respectfully disagree with the statement that
>the increased use of auxiliary verbal tenses, especially passé composé, is probably due to Germanic influence.

First, according to the language histories I've consulted (by Romance scholars Ralph Penny and Rebecca Posner), the compound past tense (with habere) was already present in spoken Latin.

Second, in contrast to the "not universal" claim in Wikipedia, Posner states that "nearly all the Romance languages make some use of a compound perfect".

Third, Posner (former Chair of Romance Linguistics at Oxford, and a great writer!) specifically disparages the Germanic hypothesis:
>Some commentators have implausibly attributed the use of the ESSE auxiliary with some intransitive verbs to the influence of German, where the distribution of haben and sein auxiliaries is similar, but others have linked it to stative and passive uses of the ESSE auxiliary.

Finally, according to Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva's World Lexicon of Grammaticalization the evolution from a possessive to a perfective is "mostly confined to European languages," meaning that it's also found elsewhere. I wish they were more specific on this point; the only other language they give as an example is Cantonese. I also wish they discussed the être-based passive.

From what I understand, programs like the University of Arizona's Master of Science in Human Language Technology have pretty good job placement records, and a lot of NLP industry jobs seem to bring in good money, so I don't think it would be a bad idea if it's something you're interested in.

As for books, one of the canonical texts in NLP seems to be Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing. It's written in such a way as to serve as an intro to computer science for linguists and as an intro to linguistics for computer scientists.

It's nearing being 10 years old, so some more modern approaches, especially neural networks, aren't really covered, iirc (I don't have my copy with me here to check).

Really, it's a pretty nice textbook, and I think it can be had fairly cheap if you can find an international version.

Recommended these a while back, great, assessable reads.

The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Instinct-Mind-Creates/dp/0061336467/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343383543&sr=8-1&keywords=the+language+instinct

Patterns in the Mind by Ray Jackendoff
http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Mind-Language-Human-Nature/dp/0465054625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383561&sr=1-1&keywords=patterns+in+the+mind

And if you are into etymology, check out

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380715430/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383614&sr=1-1&keywords=the+mother+tongue

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour Through Mankind's Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Invention/dp/0805080120/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383676&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=guy+deucher+language

Again, all superb books.

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."

That's... a big ask. Lots of people seem to like Ortega's book (disclaimer: I like Ortega's book).

But like, it would be easier to recommend readings if you could tell us your objectives. The Ortega book is mostly useful for pedagogy IMO, but it synthesizes the literature quite well. Anyway, hope this helps.

No problem, it was fun. :D

If you're interested in IE Historical Linguistics, you might want to check out Ben Fortson's awesome Introduction, though this is much more focused on the reconstructed language itself and the development of the individual daughter languages than in the history and culture of the original Indo-Europeans.

For more of a broad cultural history, you might want to check out Mallory's book, which is written in a very easy to read style.

The two resources already mentioned, (Crystal and Millward), are both too vague to help I think. I'm not sure about the Crystal one, but the Millward treats Old English as a uniform standard (that's not a criticism of the book).

What you want is something like Campbell's Old English Grammar. There is a detailed description of the various sound changes that occurred just prior to and during Old English, and in the grammar section, after recording the West Saxon norms, it gives the dialectal alternatives as well as chronological changes.

The book is old, but still the standard. More recent and excellent are this one and this one, but it's been a few years since I've read through them so I can't give more details.

Other than those, much of what you are asking for is found scattered through various books and articles, but they are all for specialists (as are the ones I give above), so they might be tough to get through depending on your knowledge of the field.

You might be interested in in Don Ringe's Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-first Century Reintegration, and Kenstowicz and Kisseberth's Generative Phonology.

There is some evidence that slips in timing of articulatory gestures is one reason for sound change, but I wouldn't necessarily characterize that as laziness or lessening the articulatory expenditures -- timing misfires go a long way toward explaining things that cannot be explained by laziness, like epenthesis (e.g. /kʌmpftrbl/ for "comfortable" [forgive the lack of diacritics for syllabic r and l] -- it is not easier to produce the cluster "mpft" than "mft").

K&K are great for understanding phonological tiers (which can explain things like vowel harmony), and Ringe's textbook is really just incredible in every way and an absolute must-own...but relevant to this discussion has a few chapters on the causes of sound change and its spread.

The English "better" is more likely a cognate with the German "besser". They follow similar morphologies:

English: good < better < best
German: gut < besser < besten

As to a deeper link between the Germanic languages of English and German and Farsi that might be a question for J.P. Malloy (http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Indo-Europeans-J-Mallory/dp/0500276161).

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain is definitely a must. Great read, too!

EDIT: Notice that it's not about the development of language in evolution, but how language and evolution co-evolved. If you're into human vs animal communication, neuro-stuffs, even semiotics, this book will be for you. Oh, and yeah, he criticizes Pinker, Chomsky, et al. So if you already know about generativism, this will be a good gateway towards modern cognitive science and cognitive 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.

Fellow English major/amateur linguist here. (Don't be sad, literature is cool too!) Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman write an incredible blog, Language Log, which has taught me at least as much about the subject as any particular university class.

Also recommend Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct for a basic, high level overview of the different fields--syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, morphology, etc. Pinker has a bias toward his particular school of psycholinguistics and he has some not-so-nice things to say about English (the discipline), but he is nonetheless a highly entertaining read.

For second language acquisition (i.e., adults), this book by Ortega is excellent. It will point you to plenty of reading on SLA. Ortega or a similar book-length overview of SLA is probably the easiest way to find seminal studies to read.

A quick search for "bibliography second language acquisition" turns up a number of useful sources -- in particular, you can look at Krashen's work in the 1980s and the subsequent reaction to and modification of it by Long, Swain, and others. Long (2007; Problems in SLA) contains two thorough literature reviews of SLA research on age and recasts. More recently, Atkinson (ed., 2011; Alternative Approaches to SLA) will give you a broader sense of where the field is headed.

Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction starts form the most bare bones/non-transformational approach up through current minimalist theories in a very straightforward and easy to understand way. A new edition is coming soon I think too. Definitely worth it, you could even skip the first couple of chapters since it's very introductory.

http://www.amazon.com/Syntax-Generative-Introduction-Introducing-Linguistics/dp/1405133848/ref=dp_ob_title_bk/192-2699667-6511854

I'm reading the volume on Romance languages from The Cambridge Language Surveys and the author consistently uses the term "dialect", despite recognizing their mutual unintelligibility, the indisputable language status of Sardinian and Friulian, and the fact that:

> The diverse dialects are 'Italian' only in the sense that they are spoken in Italy: their linguistic relationship to the standard arises from interaction rather than deed-seated and ancient affinity.

So I guess the usage is hesitant on whether to talk about "Italian languages" or "Italian dialects", despite consensus on stuff like mutual intelligibility.

http://www.amazon.com/Old-English-Historical-Linguistic-Companion/dp/052145848X

I got this book because of interest in Old English and was delighted to find it included a lot of background for the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic languages from which it developed...I think it would be right up your alley.

Mark Durie and Malcolm Ross' book on the comparative method is good, and Trask's Historical Linguistics is a good intro text.

No one's really answered your question - the idea that the vocabulary or structure of a language reflects a culture is called the Sapir-Whorf Thesis. The consensus of linguists today is that it is FALSE. The opposite of true. This tends to surprise non-linguists.

https://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/sapir.cfm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

There's a book called "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" which debunks the lie that the Inuit supposedly have lots of words for snow (they don't). https://www.amazon.com/Eskimo-Vocabulary-Irreverent-Essays-Language/dp/0226685349

Basically this is a myth that won't die.

The answer to your question is no, language omissions don't give an indication of a culture's mindset.

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

"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".

This book is excellent:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guide-Old-English-Bruce-Mitchell/dp/0470671076/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369787220&sr=8-1&keywords=guide+to+old+english

I very much enjoyed The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.

Check out Don't sleep, there are snakes by Daniel Everett , a fascinating look at another culture with a language so different to what we consider the norm.

Here is a video snippet

The Power of Babel by John McWhorter is a good standby

Oh man, there are no good books. If you're a linguistics noob and a psychology noob, try out these two books:

1. An Introduction to Language, Fromkin
   
   
2. Psychology of Language, Harley
   
   I have older editions of both of these books and I think they're fine to start out with. I would read at least some of the language processing/acquisition, phonetics, phonology, and syntax chapters in the Fromkin book [Parts 2 and 3 - chapters 8 and the first half of 9], and then move onto Harley's, which is much more about modern research. It can be a bit dense, which is why I suggest the Fromkin stuff first.

If you don't ride the UG train, The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon is a good read. Some of his biological speculation is a little questionable, but all the semiotic stuff is solid and sensible.

I'm a big fan of Fromkin's An introduction to Language

You should read this book, specifically chapter 20, entitled "Everyone Has An Accent Except Me".

Many of these stories are blown out of proportion. For example, 'wasta' is mosly used with the meaning 'clout' in colloquial Arabic.
The Hans Wehr dictionary contains a number of auto-antonyms/antagonyms that might seem confusing, but they usually pose no problems to native speakers because context acts as a natural filter. Fore more information see:

• The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language by Geoffrey K. Pullum
  
  
• 'Addad' : a study of homo-polysemous opposites in Arabic by Salim Soliman al-Khamash

Everything you want to know about this topic can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Eskimo-Vocabulary-Irreverent-Essays-Language/dp/0226685349

http://www.amazon.com/Language-Myths-Laurie-Bauer/dp/0140260234

This uses little linguistic terminology, so I think it works as "entry level" material.

Introductory book by Carnie

Bish, bash, and bosh.

I guess for next time, if there will be, I will have to read up more thoroughly on my source and cite it. You are right though, that an academic community demands the same level of rigor and proof.

We used Kenstowicz & Kisseberth's Generative Phonology. The practice questions are brutal for our first introduction to phonology.