Obtain Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction Executed By Peter Hugoe Matthews Mobi

a few false starts due to popular science approaches to linguistics, this was exactly that book i was looking for, it's maybe a two hour read, but covers everything from linguistic genealogy to parsing to the shapes your throat needs to warp into to make any of the sound we subconsciously make thousands of times a day.
Highly recommended. It makes my curiosity great again, Linguistics falls in the gap between arts and science, on the edges of which the most fascinating discoveries and the most important problems are found, Beginning at the 'arts' end of the subject with the common origins of languages, and finishing at the 'science' end with the newest discoveries regarding language in the brain, this stimulating guide covers all the major aspects of linguistics from a refreshing and insightful angle.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics, Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
A pretty good read, with some interesting parts about how English has evolved and some philosophical musings on the nature of structures, words, grammatical forms and meanings, with some illustrations of terrible quality to accompany.


To start with, Matthews does a good job in getting your attention, and he presents some interesting cases in linguistics that are worth researching further, However, he quickly loses some momentum, and he is too passive in acknowledging how linguists can contribute to fruitful interdisciplinary quests, For example, there are a lot of interesting ways in which linguistics can be combined with psychology or even music psychology!, but Matthews shows an approach to this which seems almost dismissive.
Also, biolinguistics is a new and very interesting field, but language and evolution does not receive enough attention in this introduction,

The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford is overall very readable, and Matthews book is no exception apart from a kind of tedious chapter on phonetics, but unfortunately it does not engage enough to make the reader want to jump right on to the next book.
A shame, since there are a lot of interesting aspects in linguistics if you take some liberties in broadening the field of study,./

A good introduction for anyone who doesn't know

much about Linguistics, It is very interesting and relatively wellwritten,
As usual with these sorts of texts, there are a few things that weren't new for me and others that are already out of date, I did learn more than I expected, though, which was good,
It might be the nature of it being an introductory book, but there were moments where I felt the author repeated himself quite a bit to reinforce an idea.
This got a bit tiring at times, especially when I've understood his point the first time he made it and the repetitiveness just made me more confused about whether he had actually made a point or not.
Not the best of overviews, but interesting nonetheless, Some examples are incredibly specific and require knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet, với mình cuốn này vừa đủ để gọi là dẫn nhập ngắn,

việc sử dụng tiếng việt của mình hoàn toàn là bản năng, trong khi nếu phải học để sử dụng một ngôn ngữ khác thì hoàn toàn là bị áp đặtvề ngữ pháp, cách dùng, nên mình nghĩ cũng sẽ thú vị nếu thử đọc một cuốn sách để tìm hiểu cách thức người ta tạo ra, sử dụng, các biến đổi ngôn ngữ ra sao.
. . nhưng mà mãi giờ mới đọc :p I didn't actually finish this because the library demanded it back, but I probably won't return to it, at least not any time soon.
Not that it's repellent, but other books I've been reading on the topic seem more focused, more specific, more fitting to what I'm after, and I'll probably just move on to another book on my list.
It seems like it probably is what it says it isa very short introduction, and general at that, which I probably could use, but I still think I'll move on.
The library dictates it. Brains, words, history, anthropology, culture how does all of it compress into the territory of a human interaction How did we come to learn to exchange clever combos of sounds to mean stuff Why are languages so very different Are they even translatable or do we lose large layers of meaning each time stuff gets translated River riviere/fleuve Not bad, but not great either.
Matthews doesn't really give you a clear sense of what linguistics is, in my opinion, but he does cover a number of interesting areas, It's worth a read, if you're looking for a quick summary of a handful of interesting ideas, but if you want depth OR breadth, go elsewhere, Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction Very Short Introductions, P, H. Matthews

Linguistics falls in the gap between arts and science, on the edges of which the most fascinating discoveries and the most important problems are found, Beginning at the 'arts' end of the subject with the common origins of languages, and finishing at the 'science' end with the newest discoveries regarding language in the brain, this stimulating guide covers all the major aspects of linguistics from a refreshing and insightful angle.
A pretty decent read. I went into this already quite familiar with linguistics, wanting to get reacquainted with some concepts, On the historical side, this was very much accomplished, Our journey through the history of language was paved with nice wording and concise text, Jolly good!

Unfortunately, the linguistic side is rather lacking, Very little is covered, I believe too little even for a very short introduction, Language theories are very briefly mentioned and only a couple aspects of grammar are touched upon,

If I was new to the field, or if I wanted to read about this topic as an outsider, I believe this would be a/, It does just enough to entice you to delve deeper into linguistics, But unfortunately and maybe unsurprisingly this is not very useful for more experienced readers, Still, a light read! I was constantly asking myself throughout this book "what is he getting at" or "what is the point of this chapter" "or what is the point of these examples.
" It was a very sporadic and poorly organized introduction to linguistics, Whats wrong with linguistics Linguists, Theyre involved in a huge and fascinating field, but bogged down in areas that are mind numbingly dull and dont seem to tell us much of anything, For instance, do all languages have a universal root Well, lets look at commonalities across and between languages, say, Greek and Sanskrit, until were bored to tears before admitting what could have prevented such a wasteful exploration in the first place: we dont know and even if we did, what would that really tell us.
Next up, what are some features of languages Well, in English, youll be happy to discover, one is that we tend to talk about things in the singular and plural.
What You already knew that Well, heres five pages of examples dog vs, dogs just in case you didnt, And are you in need of a refresher on prepositions How about this to get your intellectual juices flowing The pen is INSIDE the box, No Okay, try this one: Mary is BETWEEN Bill and Andrew, And such constructs might affect the way we think Isnt that amazing Onward, Having trouble sleeping Sentences like this should help:

“Thus, if we take a set a, b, c, with members a, b, and c, and subtract from it a set b, c, with members b and c, the result must be also a set, a, which has a single member a.
”

There, are you now clear on the concept of “sets” or do I hear snoring

And, say, whats the connection between language and thought Certainly thats an area worth exploring, eh Is language thought Or is thought language Well, a picture of a woman wearing a sling accompanied by the question, “Has she or has she not broken her arm” should have you doing a philosophical contortion act in your quest for enlightenment and by that I mean youll probably be icing your wrists and sharpening a blade.


Goodness gracious. Is this book really from Oxford The writer starts out by telling us its hard to study linguistics because language is partly a social construction, only it takes several pages for him to get this out and then he keeps coming back to it as though its a stunning revelation.
Yes, yes, we know, we know, The social world is socially constructed, Just say it once, and move on, Also, just as the readers spotted a topic that seems interesting, e, g. for me: What is language, the writer wanders off in some other direction, telling us how many languages there are or that languages are “abstractions” what does that mean and brace yourself dialects may be whole other languages.


This is effort is poor, I read the books in this series on the British Empire and Carl Jung and they were outstanding, They touched on all the foundational knowledge, included lots of citations, and went into the debates, e, g. Was Jung a Nazi sympathiser or antiSemite How have his theories held up and Was the Empire good or bad Can it be distilled to something as simple as good or bad Those books provided excellent OVERVIEWS, giving you a framework and sources for further exploration, but this book seems to discuss only what the writer finds interesting and that, to oversimplify, mainly involves languages origins, language families yawn, and an array of linguistic nuts and bolts.
There are few references to other linguists except ones whose views are outdated, with the exceptions perhaps of Chomsky and Saussure, other branches of linguistics, or key and competing theories, e.
g. conceptualizations of what language is, etc, But the worst part of this book is that it is so incredibly dull, Finally, this review represents a criticism and therefore could provide you with more insight into what language is than the book it criticizes,

Troy Parfitt is the author of War Torn: Adventures in the Brave New Canada
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