L'origine delle lingue

On 29 December 1566, Tycho Brahe, a young Danish nobleman who was studying at the University of Rostock, quarrelled with his third cousin Manderup Parsberg about the validity of a mathematical formula. Neither side would back down and they ended up fighting a duel over it, which resulted in Brahe lo Leggi tutto

One of the most fascinating books that I have ever read. The author was a student of the late Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University. Some of their theories are not widely accepted by academics. But if the out-of-Africa consensus among anthropologists is true, it seems plausible that all languages

Don't read this book without a paper and pen, there are exercises that are worth the effort.

Glad I had pen/paper at the ready for the (short) technical exercises... Really fascinating how the author constructed a taxonomy of languages, starting from the individual languages and going into increasingly higher-level, more inclusive families to argue for the "monogenesis" of all languages fro Leggi tutto

Some of it is interesting, but the author sounds bitter about other scholars not agreeing with him.

This is a very intriguing book about how languages can be compared to discover language families, and how the technique can then be extrapolated to discover families of families. For example, if you’re interested in a book like this you are probably familiar with the term proto-Indo-European in hist Leggi tutto

This book was super-interesting. Some of Ruhlens theories about language groups seemed rather implausible, but they were still fascinating to consider

[9:13 am, 20/05/2022] Sidi M. Yusoff: The book propounds the monogenetic theory of origin of language. What this means is that the author believes that all languages originated from a single mother-language. This thesis is problematic exactly because there’s no records at all regarding this proto-la Leggi tutto

Very fascinating book that traces the origin of languages, and tries to find common ancestor languages to modern languages, and connections between different language families. Before reading the book, I had an assumption that similarities between languages are mainly a result of borrowing, where one Leggi tutto