The Loom of Language

Product Information

Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. The spoken language of a speech community is continually changing. Where uniformity exists, local dialects crop up.

In less than a thousand years what was a local dialect may become the official speech of a nation that cannot communicate with its neighbors without the help of an interpreter or translator. The Loom of Language shares much information and spirit with The Seven Sieves. The latter is also very good, but Loom is more comprehensive and easier to find. There is even a scanned copy available on Archive.org. Interestingly, WWII and the Balkan wars in the 90’s were what encouraged me to start learning languages in the first place. I wanted to read the original documents and journals and newspapers and try to understand why wars happen and where the hatred for other human beings comes from. There are still several armed conflicts happening all over the world, and the racist propaganda against immigrants in several countries, including both my home and adopted countries, is what keeps me learning languages – so that one day I can help those immigrants, and especially refugees, adjust to their new lives and fight against the discrimination. Perhaps I am a bleeding-heart liberal when it comes to the underprivileged (especially the poor who are usually immigrants) but rampant inequality among groups of people is heart-breaking to me; and even though it sounds trite and clichéd, I still believe that learning foreign languages plays a large part in making the world a better place. It also includes how a man can communicate across continents and down the ages through the impersonal and permanent record which we call writing.

The book explains why these shifts happen, why French and English have hundreds of common words like this, and how to learn them without any mental strain. This book is a combination of a reference book, with parts meant to be consulted as needed, and some chapters meant to be read from beginning to end. 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. There are sections devoted to learning other Romance languages once you know your first one, I hope to make use of this someday! That narrow focus allows a degree of specific insight missing from similar books.

Why learn linguistics? We learn how older languages like Old English forked into German and English, and that there are a few common changes to know. e.g. in Wasser and “water”, W in Old English has not changed over time and remains the same in English. In German it sounds like V. The Old English word wæter had a hard T consonant that survived to English, but evolved to “ss” and softened in German. The point of learning this is that there are a handful of these changes you can learn and then you will automatically know hundreds of words without effort. Of itself, no such change can bring the age-long calamity of war to an end; and it is a dangerous error to conceive that it can do so. We cannot hope to reach a remedy for the language obstacles to international co-operation on a democratic footing, while predatory finance capital, intrigues or armament manufacturers, and the vested interest of a rentier class in the misery of colonial peoples continue to stifle the impulse to a world-wide enterprise for the common wealth of mankind. No language reform can abolish war, while social agencies far more powerful than mere linguistic misunderstandings furnish fresh occasion for it. What intelligent language planning can do is to forge a new instrument for human collaboration on a planetary scale, when social institutions propitious to international strife no longer thwart the constructive task of planning health, leisure and plenty for all.” I have only read parts. I have had a year of Biblical Greek and a few years of French, a too-short crash course in Spanish and I want to learn Brazilian (Almost a distinct language from continental Portuguese).The book was edited by Bodmer’s friend Lancelot Hogben, a zoologist turned popular science writer and inventor of the auxiliary language Interglossa, and was part of a series of books entitled Primers for the Age of Plenty that also included volumes on mathematics, general science, and history. The science and history books are long out of print, but the mathematics book, Mathematics for the Million, remains available. (I, of course, own a copy and will review it eventually…) One difference between speech and writing is important to anyone who is trying to learn a foreign language, especially if it is closely related to a language already familiar. I give it five stars for a very specific reason: the incredible time-saving insights. Here's an example. The first part of the book starts with the history of human language and alphabets and leads into morphology and syntax of several languages, and ends with the classification of languages throughout the world. The second part focuses on learning vocabulary (from the given lists) taking advantage of similarities among languages and sound shifts that cause predictable changes from one language to another. What I always found most important, however, was the assertion that you should learn certain words first, such as personal pronouns, auxiliary verbs, demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, etc. (essentially function words) because they are the most common and least recognizable when they change cases.