Why learn linguistics? We learn how older languages like Old English forked into German and English, and that there are a few common changes to know. e.g. in Wasser and “water”, W in Old English has not changed over time and remains the same in English. In German it sounds like V. The Old English word wæter had a hard T consonant that survived to English, but evolved to “ss” and softened in German. The point of learning this is that there are a handful of these changes you can learn and then you will automatically know hundreds of words without effort. The wonderful thing about The Loom of Languageis how ahead of its time it was in terms of understanding the right approach to language learning. The problem is that seventy years later the same misunderstandings and misapprehensions exist, as if no progress was made at all! Interestingly, WWII and the Balkan wars in the 90’s were what encouraged me to start learning languages in the first place. I wanted to read the original documents and journals and newspapers and try to understand why wars happen and where the hatred for other human beings comes from. There are still several armed conflicts happening all over the world, and the racist propaganda against immigrants in several countries, including both my home and adopted countries, is what keeps me learning languages – so that one day I can help those immigrants, and especially refugees, adjust to their new lives and fight against the discrimination. Perhaps I am a bleeding-heart liberal when it comes to the underprivileged (especially the poor who are usually immigrants) but rampant inequality among groups of people is heart-breaking to me; and even though it sounds trite and clichéd, I still believe that learning foreign languages plays a large part in making the world a better place.

I’m looking forward to someday using the section about working within the Romance and Teutonic languages. e.g. if you know the German or Dutch word, you can deduce the meaning of Swedish or Danish words. Here's an example from the Lord's Prayer that many English speakers could probably read already. I have only read parts. I have had a year of Biblical Greek and a few years of French, a too-short crash course in Spanish and I want to learn Brazilian (Almost a distinct language from continental Portuguese). The first half of the 20 th century was a heady time for language learning and study. The field of philology (now commonly called historical linguistics) was at its zenith. Much of the evolution of the Proto-Indo European language family had been worked out. The hope that a world-wide auxiliary language, such as Esperanto, would be adopted internationally had not yet been utterly dashed by the two World Wars.

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The Loom was an interesting high-level academic read of the history of many languages. Its primary focus is on Western European languages. It uses written Chinese as a language to use as a grammar syntax benchmark, and takes a shallow look into other languages like Persian, Bantu, Arabic, and others — including some Slavic. The book contains essays about the Latin and Greek origins of European words. He discusses Romance and Germanic languages. He describes trends in the syntax and semantics of the language families. 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. Given that I would never say "I wash" but instead, "I'm washing myself", I lost trust in a lot of what the book said about the "advanced evolution of Anglo-American". Other similar books teach you to learn any language, including those outside the Indo-European language family that share literally nothing with your native tongue, English. The Loom of Language starts with multiple chapters about linguistics. (contra Benny the Polyglot, Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World who counsels speaking on Day 1, and Kaufmann, The Way of the Linguist: A Language Learning Odyssey who would have me reading text with native speaker audio on Day 1).

Of itself, no such change can bring the age-long calamity of war to an end; and it is a dangerous error to conceive that it can do so. We cannot hope to reach a remedy for the language obstacles to international co-operation on a democratic footing, while predatory finance capital, intrigues or armament manufacturers, and the vested interest of a rentier class in the misery of colonial peoples continue to stifle the impulse to a world-wide enterprise for the common wealth of mankind. No language reform can abolish war, while social agencies far more powerful than mere linguistic misunderstandings furnish fresh occasion for it. What intelligent language planning can do is to forge a new instrument for human collaboration on a planetary scale, when social institutions propitious to international strife no longer thwart the constructive task of planning health, leisure and plenty for all.” The book explains why these shifts happen, why French and English have hundreds of common words like this, and how to learn them without any mental strain. As I said above, Part II is a treasure trove. Bodmer distills everything a student needs to know about sound correspondences, etc. to make connections across the outlined languages and accelerate learning. The only annoyance is that the huge tables in Part IV aren't available online somewhere as spreadsheets (the book was written in the '40s) so one could import them into a spaced repetition system like Anki for efficient learning. I'm working on typing these out for my own purposes, but this will take awhile. People still tell me they cannot possibly learn a language because they took classes in school and failed to become fluent (although they usually also admit they passedthe classes, which should be evidence enough that something is wrong). Bodmer knew what was wrong seven decades ago, noting the drudgery of the so-called ‘direct method’ of language instruction, which bans the use of the native language. There is zero evidence that this approach works, while there isevidence that it actually inhibits learning. Yet here we are, still following the same approach. This book is a product of its time. The author was multilingual but not a linguist. The book was written right after WWII. The author's purpose was to aid people to be able to communicate with each other so that understanding between people would contribute to the prevention of future wars.A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge 6 Volume Set One difference between speech and writing is important to anyone who is trying to learn a foreign language, especially if it is closely related to a language already familiar. Five = penta / πέντε = panch / पाच (Marathi / Hindi) = cinqo = cinco = quinque (Latin); fünf German; fiif Frisian (closet to English or old English) ; cinci Romanian; pyat' пять Russian. LANGUAGE implies more than learning to signal like a firefly or to talk like a parrot. It means more than the unique combination which we call human speech.