Scarica Recensione libro verifica e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! EL HOR CHAIMAA 20041643 A LITTLE BOOK OF LANGUAGE A little book of language is a book written by the famous linguist David Crystal.The work,published by Yale University Press in 2010,analyzes language in all its characteristics,from its birth to its purposes. The book is highly recommended to young people and beginners in the study of language as it shows up with a conversational, colloquial and clear tone to make the reader more engaged . The first seven chapters deal with babies and their language development from their birth. In their first months all babies over the world make some specific sounds to express specific feelings such as pain or hunger,no matter where they are born or which language their father and mother speak. The writer also underlines how children's speed of learning is impressive. The Origin of Speech and Writing are also discussed in chapters 15 and 16,as well as Language Decay is discussed in chapter 20. In the next section the author writes about some of the characteristics of the current language as its variation that is discussed in chapter 21 and 22. Digital Revolution is discussed several times in this book because of its importance in the way it affects our current language. The last two chapters deal with linguistics and define its principal characteristics. I would like to focus my review on chapter 19 whose title is 'Comparing Languages' .The writer makes some comparisons between languages underlining the most relevant differences between them. The first comparison is made between Chinese and English,that also represents the European language.The author states that Speakers of Chinese speak in a 'sing- song' way to English ears.He then, goes on explaining that's because Chinese uses the melody of the voice to distinguish between words and that is not something that happens in European Languages.In English if we say a word such as 'mother' high up in our voice or low down it makes no difference to the meaning of the word.But in Chinese this difference in pitch height is more relevant as it can change completely the meaning of a word.For example the word 'ma' said high up in the voice means 'mother' but if it is said low in the voice it means 'horse'. There are other languages that differ from others because of word order.For example,while English and German put most of their adjectives before the noun,French puts them after the noun(a black cat- un chat noir). In some other languages such as Latin the ending of the word can change its meaning.In the sentence 'canis vidit puerum ' 'the dog saw the boys ' ,we are able to identify the subject,the verb and the direct object thanks to the endings of the words. D.Crystal also quotes the phenomenon of 'false friends' that often try to fool us when learning a new language.They're those words which look familiar to words from our language but they have a completely different meaning.The word 'libreria' in Italian is similar to the word 'library' in English,but it has not the same meaning as its real meaning is 'bookshop' .
