Compendium of the World's Languages
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Book Description
Many languages, particularly those which have achieved literary status, have been studied and described in depth. Here, for the first time, is a general survey covering a wide spectrum of the world's languages - from all language families - is available in a single, scholarly source. The articles in the Compendium are arranged to encourage and allow comparative study - showing how each language ha...
MoreMany languages, particularly those which have achieved literary status, have been studied and described in depth. Here, for the first time, is a general survey covering a wide spectrum of the world's languages - from all language families - is available in a single, scholarly source. The articles in the Compendium are arranged to encourage and allow comparative study - showing how each language has its own characteristic profile, and illustrating how it actually works. In these two volumes, George Campbell describes over three hundred of the many forms taken by human speech, from the well-documented to the relatively obscure. Particularly interesting are the descriptions of such exotic languages as Navajo, Mapudunga and Gorontalo. Dead' languages associated with the great cultures of the past - Classical Chinese, Sumerian and Sanskrit, Classical Greek and Latin - are included, as well as intriguing isolates such as Etruscan and Tangut. Throughout the book, the treatment is simple and factual; technical terminology is used only where necessary. The articles are ordered alphabetically, and each has a standardized structure for ease of reference: * General historical and sociolinguistic introduction * The writing system * The sound system * The grammatical system The Compendium has several additional features. To illustrate each language that has a written tradition, a passage from the Gospel of St John is appended to the language description, reproduced in the original script. For those languages with their own writing systems, an appendix at the end of the book reproduces and explains each script in full. In addition to the descriptions of individual languages, there are forty one articles describing language families.
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