Historical Linguistics

Rating:
Summary: Paging Mr. Trask....
Review: Historical Linguistics is an interesing topic to read about. This book does an pretty good job explaining the tool kit an historical linguist needs to reconstruct proto-languages as well as understand language roots. In some cases it seems to be a little off balance, offering more attention to a particular topic and lacking information on another. But all in all it is a helpful text, providing good examples and practice data at the end of each chapter. It is annoying, however, that they didn't pay much attention to the editing. Often a set of data will be referred to in the text but won't show up until the next page or two and the topic of discussion has already changed.

The author provides a lot of interesting case studies with discussion, mostly in the English language since that's his native language. But they are great examples of the work accomplished by historical linguists and demonstrate clearly the principles he is discussing.

Good book.