Reading List: Teach Yourself Linguistics
I’ve just started Teach Yourself Linguistics, by Jean Aitchison.
So far, it’s living up to the generally great reviews it’s gotten in the ConLang forums where I lurk. The chapters are short and to the point, which I appreciate this week since I’ve been sick and not getting enough sleep. Also, the writing style is much, much livelier than the linguistics textbook that I tried to read last year. I was braced for a quite boring academic discussion of linguistics for linguists, but it’s really been presented in a format for the average joe. Well, if the average joe was interested in linguistics. Anyway, you get my point. I really look forward to the rest of the book now that I’ve gotten started on it. Hopefully, I’ll get enough out of this one to finally feel comfortable trying to design a decent language for my fiction. Well, actually, I hope to design several, but one step at a time, eh?
