Language And Its Study, With Especial Reference To The Indo-European Family Of Languages: Seven Lectures - Softcover

William Dwight Whitney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0461329158 ISBN 13: 9780461329155

Publisher: HardPress, 2019

Synopsis

Language And Its Study, With Especial Reference To The Indo-European Family Of Languages: Seven Lectures by William Dwight Whitney provides a foundational introduction to linguistic science. Whitney surveys the history, aims, and methods of the study of language, arguing that language is a historical, moral science, and that the utterances of thought are transmitted through tradition and social use. The lectures explain how languages grow by processes such as agglutination, compounding, and the loss or transformation of inflections, and illustrate these ideas with clear examples from English and other Indo-European tongues. The book offers a detailed account of the Indo-European family, its unity and its major branches—Germanic, Romance, Greek, Slavonic, Celtic, Iranian, and Indian—and it outlines the comparative method and the central role of etymology in tracing word history. Accompanied by editor’s notes and introductory materials, the work covers phonetic change, the origin of suffixes, noun and verb formation, and the relation of language to culture, thought, and ethnology.

Edition details

• Publisher: HardPress
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0461329158
• ISBN 13: 9780461329155
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 354