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Crash Course in Linguistics? | ||
Tags: Linguistics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ashiro Groupie United Kingdom learnxlanguage.com/ Joined 5804 days ago 89 posts - 101 votes  Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 11 20 June 2009 at 1:46am | IP Logged |
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I would imagine there's lots of us who like reading about languages as well as learning them specifically. However, I'm hitting constant roadblocks due to my lack of linguistics training. This is mainly when reading Wikipedia entries and I wondered if there was a crash course that could fill me in enough to understand the average Wikipedia article without spending 6 months reading related articles?
Questions such as: * Diacritics, what? * Orthography? * "laminal postalveolars" - I beg your pardon? * "phonetic-morphological" - hmmmm.... Anyone a good resource for getting a crash course on all the terminology or maybe a better place to learn language concepts but in easier language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5877 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German | Message 2 of 11 20 June 2009 at 2:35am | IP Logged |
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I just do a quick google search.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 11 20 June 2009 at 2:35am | IP Logged |
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*diacritics = the additional marks on letters that exist to give them a different phonetic value or convey information about the stress/accent pattern.
Umlauts, accent marks, cedilla, tilde, macron - all those funny little marks you English people miss out on thanks to your crazy orthograpy which is *correct spelling *laminal and behind the alveolar ridge (the bumps you can feel with the tip on your tongue on the roof of your mouth just behind your upper front teeth) *... (only a very vague idea) Do you know the google search command "define:Word"? Often the results are enough to clarify things. No linguistics training either, just my love of books and a nervous finger when links are provided. Oh, Firefox with tabs, how I love thee! (Ever tried to read a paper on the structure of lexical entries without any prior knowledge of the topic? It's fun :D) Edited by Bao on 20 June 2009 at 2:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| anamsc Triglot Senior Member Andorra Joined 6205 days ago 296 posts - 382 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan Studies: Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Written), French | Message 4 of 11 20 June 2009 at 5:49pm | IP Logged |
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When I come across linguistic terms I'm not familiar with, I usually can find a good explanation of them on Wikipedia.
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| Ashiro Groupie United Kingdom learnxlanguage.com/ Joined 5804 days ago 89 posts - 101 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 11 21 June 2009 at 1:52am | IP Logged |
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I know I can do Google searches and click Wikipedia links. I just want to avoid the very common problem of 'wasting' 3 hours researching liguistic terminology.
Wikipedia has a very canny nack of eating time. Thank you for your suggestions though. They're much appreciated. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 11 21 June 2009 at 1:10pm | IP Logged |
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Try to find an introductory phonetics/phonology/linguistics textbook aimed at students who take basic courses at uni. I had an excellent one when I took a class in linguistics at uni (linguistic lingo for language students/nerds type thing), the book was in Norwegian though so wouldn't help you. Perhaps you could have a look around Amazon for basics books of this sort, or look at some uni websites to see what books they use, or stop by a university bookstore or a library and ask the people there - you'd be surprised how much they know. It'll help you to no end to actually run through a textbook that introduces these terms in an orderly sort of way, though of course you can just look stuff up in Wikipedia as you go along if you prefer. I'm glad I took the course though, it really helped.
No specific recommendations I'm afraid, but I'm sure there's lots of good stuff easily available so just have a look around and see what you can find. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 21 June 2009 at 1:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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