The Loom of Language. A guide to foreign languages for the home student ... Edited and arranged by Lancelot Hogben. With plates (Primers for the Age of Plenty. no. 3.)

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There is so much great information in here that it requires repeat readings over several years, especially Part II. (I'm on my first pass.) Consider this book a meta-manual for learning how to learn languages. 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.

If you dream of learning more than one language from the following list, read/skim this book and use the tips. It will save you time and effort overall. The list: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, plus the languages in the above quote. The ideas will also work for languages like Catalan and Romanian, but you will have to find the relative shifts somewhere else, which won't be hard to do once you understand how they usually work.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.

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. 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. This book is a combination of a reference book, with parts meant to be consulted as needed, and some chapters meant to be read from beginning to end. The sections of interest to me right now were written for a very specific audience: native English speakers intent on learning Romance and Teutonic languages. There are sections devoted to learning other Romance languages once you know your first one, I hope to make use of this someday! That narrow focus allows a degree of specific insight missing from similar books. 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". At one point, the author mentions that his only suggestion for learning Russian is to have been born in Russia and have grown up there. I laughed out loud when I read that.

I give it five stars for a very specific reason: the incredible time-saving insights. Here's an example. Sidenote: In linguistic circles people love to dig into exceptions and point out when rules break down, which can make learners abandon something incredibly useful for fear of making mistakes. But you should not be discouraged by ivory-tower elitism. You are going to make mistakes and fall into traps no matter what, so don’t get discouraged by exceptions. 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. 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. Finally, he provides a vocabulary of 500 words for the major Romance languages and for the major Germanic languages. His argument is that if a person learned the Latin and Greek vocabulary lists and all of the 500 word vocabulary lists of all of the languages he provides that a person could understand and make himself understood anywhere in Europe.