How Dead Languages Work

This is an interesting book. It examines several languages and their similarity. But first a brief tale. Some years ago I opened an office in Athens. My first stay and I was at the bar at the Marriott with colleagues and was going to impress them with my vast knowledge, you can laugh. So I spoke to the waitress using my secondary school New Testament Greek, and she turned to me in her New York accent and said, "I don't speak Greek, I from Astoria, Queens, working for my uncle!" We then switched to English, complete with my New York accent. My second try after a year catching up on modern Greek was at the new airport at 3AM trying to get to my hotel. The cab driver spoke no English so I managed to speak using a combination of Italian and Greek, and we got there. So the author's presentation was of great interest.I especially enjoyed his details on Latin, having had a few years of it, and I got to understand nuances which I never had seen before. His Greek was equally enlightening but a bit of a more difficult slog. What I would have liked in his Latin was not just the classic period but how it migrated through the Middle Ages. 14th century Latin, scholastic, seemed to rapidly disappear as local languages exploded.The author presents Old English and German and strangely Old Irish. Old English is a step before Middle English and Chaucer, and it would have been interesting to see that nexus. The author contends that it was in 1066 and Hastings that the change occurred. Yet even French was not used until quite later, and it was Middle French at that. Old Irish has always been a difficult tongue and the author provide some insight but it was a bit too complex.The author does Sanskrit and Hebrew. I have had some Hebrew, classic and contemporary, and found this interesting. It would be nice to compare Hebrew and Arabic, especially outlining cultural differences in the use of verbs and thus in actions.Overall it is a good book of observations. The main weakness in my view is that it rambles like a conversation, one new thought after another, inserting some examples, but lacking in any structure. The author starts with some idea, speaks of it and then shifts to another idea. It is not a book I found one could read sequentially. One could pick it up, read a bit, then easily more 50 pages and read a bit more.Overall if one has had to deal with many languages then this is of great interest. I suspect that many non-traveled and less classically trained Americans may find this a bit disconnected. For me, however, each page has some interesting insights, albeit lacking structure, but providing a well educated discussion easy to read.

This book is thorough, detailed and precise on is description of the language it discusses. The author clearly knows his field. I particularly appreciated that these old languages are presented as languages that has all the characteristics of natural human language: although they certainly had their own character, they were not fundamentally different in some way from languages spoken today, in the sense that they were more exact or "better", or even more "logical" somehow. They were human languages, and this book presents wonderful sketches of what that were really like.

Requires some background in linguistics, in my ( post graduate level education) opinion.

If you’re interested in the descendants of Proto-Indo-European languages, or if you have a passing familiarity with some Latin or Greek, this will open a new and quite different linguistic world. I wish now I had spent more time on my Anglo-Saxon grammar and kept up better with my Latin. A fine introduction to philology and it’s many branches.

I've had some previous exposure to Latin, but I didn't know a thing about linguistics and its underlying jargon.The writing style is not dry as I expected. Quite the contrary, the concepts are introduced with examples and analogies with English.The book weaves together many threads when interpreting the reference texts from each language, and that can be a little bit daunting at times.My conclusion is that I will need additional studies to fully understand everything being discussed, but what I did manage to understand made the book well worth my while.

This is an eccentric and enjoyable book. The chapter on ancient Greek is particularly good. Notice: You need to bring to this book a reasonably detailed understanding of the anatomy of human speech, or at least be willing to engage in independent study to get that understanding.

Entertainingly written with a good selection of topics and literature.

There are many people who would like to know more about Latin and Greek, but have better things to do than memorize irregular verbs. This is the book for them.

O conteúdo entrega o que promete. Eu esperava que fosse um pouco mais exaustivo e profundo, mas vale a pena sim.

This is a book that need not be read in the order in which it is printed. Unless one has a sound background in Greek or Latin, if you are an English speaker I recommend that one starts with Chapter 4 "Old English & The Germanic Languages". Because the author demonstrates pronunciation by comparison to his own use of current English this gives one a chance to understand that he does not quite use British Received Pronunciation and this helps when other tongues are considered in further chapters. This chapter helped understand the level at which the book was pitched and the methods used to illustrate examples.This is a book which shows the general structure of various old languages not a textbook for learning them. It does a superb job. The chapter on "Sanskrit" was revealing and that on "Old Irish & The Celtic Languages" made me amazed that anyone could cope with those or their modern equivalent. In each section of this book there are examples of how the structures of the descendants of each old tongue still affect modern English (Especially the Irish & Welsh idioms). Even the chapter on a non-IndoEuropean language (Hebrew) through biblical translations shows its effects.As I indicated, once one has read chapters 4 - 7 I suggest the Introduction should follow. Chapters 2 & 3 (Greek & Latin) become a bit laboured and by that time you might feel that you have drawn all you need from this work and so skip much of these two. They are still sound but a bit long.

My interest in deal languages is pretty casual. I do not know anything about the technicalities of sound making. The book is fascinating; I picked up a lot of interesting points about a bunch of languages. I could not enjoy the book to the fullest due to my own limited understanding of how sounds are made. I ended up skipping over some parts of the books but I finished it with renewed respect for people who have taken the trouble to learn different languages and for the complexity of languages and the different ways in which meaning is expressed.

This is the clearest account of an admittedly minority interest topic. Previous works, that I have read, have. failed to convince me that we can make more than a series of wild guesses at Proto Indo- European but I now see unravelling it is a possibility. I am an interested non specialist, who did a little Latin at school about sixty years ago and have some basic conversational level French. I found it dealt with the topics clearly and concisely and illustrated its points with accessible examples. An excellent introduction - I look forward to more from this writer.

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