The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages

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Hogben was educated at Cambridge as a biologist, but never limited himself to a single field of inquiry.

Its designing is a worthy task for the collaboration of the best minds, but meanwhile what can we do to ease the linguistic strains the next fifty years will put upon the world? Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Other similar books teach you to learn any language, including those outside the Indo-European language family that share literally nothing with your native tongue, English.The other, the second part, is the most intelligent discussion yet published of the problems of constructing a synthetic or artificial language. The Old English word wæter had a hard T consonant that survived to English, but evolved to “ss” and softened in German. Edited by Lancelot Hogben, this book, concentrating on the European languages, demonstrates their commonalities, the regularities of changes as radicals move from language to language.

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. The Loom of Language helps learners avoid wasted time by explaining how things normally go for the various languages. The English language is a mongrel, consisting of 29% Norman French vocab grafted onto German grammar, with an incredible 9% of our vocab coming from Greek as well. This is addressed to those who, when studying a foreign language, wish to have as wide and clear ideas as possible of what they are doing.One final note- the final section of the book has extensive word lists for the previously mentioned groups, as well as Greek roots used in scientific terminology. Taking advantage of the Latin and Teutonic roots would greatly aid learning the Romance and Germanic languages, respectively. Anyone who loves learning languages will certainly benefit from his practical advice on how to focus on a combination of important vocabulary and how to triangulate from what you already know into a mastery of virtually every major language in Europe. I’m looking forward to someday using the section about working within the Romance and Teutonic languages.