Story Of Language Mario Pei Pdf To Word

From the dawn of time to the mid-twentieth century.Mario Pei discusses the formation and development of language - the weapon by which mankind has advanced from savagery to civilization. New features in this revised edition: -A new chapter on 'SELF-DESIGNATION' discusses the names by which countries and people call themselves, as opposed to the names outsiders give them. All softbizscripts nulled theme wordpress.

The Story of Human Language Part I. Scope: Language is more than words; it is also how the words are put together—grammar. The ability to use fluent, nuanced. The Story of Language PDF Book by Mario Andrew Pei 1960 ePub Free Download. From the dawn of time to the mid-twentieth century.Mario Pei discusses the fo.

-A new chapter on 'LANGUAGE AND PSYCHOLOGY' covers one of the mysterious areas of language - the connection of words with the mental processes of both the individual and the social group. -Detailed discussion of such additional languages as Vietnamese and the African tongues. -New material on nonlinguistic systems of communication, such as gestural and symbolic language, and animal talk.

-Most recent findings on the origin of language and how a child learns to speak. -Coverage of slang (American, British, foreign); underworld cant and professional jargons; government gobbledygook; the language of euphemism, politeness and insult brought up to date. This, an eminently readable survey of all the World’s languages and their characteristics, is one of the most interesting books I’ve come across.

Mario Pei (1901-1978) “was born in Rome, Italy, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1908. By the time he was out of high school he knew not only English and his native Italian but also Latin, Greek, and French. Over the years he became fluent in several other languages (including Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and German) capable of speaking some 30 others, and acquainted with the structure of at least 100 of the world's languages.” (Wikipedia). I can well believe it: the breadth of knowledge displayed in this book is quite astonishing. It is divided into five parts: 1. The History of Language 2. The Constituent Elements of Language 3.

The Social Functions of Language 4. Modern Spoken Tongues 5. An International Language The whole work, in addition to generalities, is replete with fascinating snippets: did you know that Bantu has words for “One who loses other people’s things” (mumagamagama) and “one who growls when woken up in the morning” (muwandoloci)?

I did notice a few errors on British usage (notably “Britisher” for “Briton”), but these are trivial. Of course, this book (in its first edition, anyway) was written before Chomsky revolutionised modern linguistics, but I didn’t feel any deficiency on that basis at all. I thoroughly recommend this to anyone with the slightest interest in the subject. The book receives 2/5 stars because only 2/5s of the book was useful.

The first part of the book provides an enjoyable history of Indo-European/Romantic languages with historical anecdotes with words that have remained from older cultures. The rest of the book proceeds to lists pages filled with bullet point style lists of words and the common cognates in other languages. Not very useful, especially when explanations frequently came in other languages with no attempt at explaining the dozen or so other languages cited. So unless you are familiar with an absurd amount of foreign languages, many pages are useless.

To top it all off, the author spends the entire book explaining how languages have always morphed and will always morph (due to mistakes, emigrations, etc.), but proceeds to state that governments should dictate a universal language and that this universal language could be a reality in less than a hundred years! A very unattached academic work.