Anatole Lyovin, Introduction to the languages of the world. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xx, 491. Pb $35.00.

Abstract

It used to be that first-year linguistics students would be exposed to data from a wide variety of languages – in the classic textbooks of Bloomfield 1933, Gleason 1961, or Hockett 1958, and in the workbooks of Gleason 1955 and of Merrifield et al. 1967. We may not have known exactly where Nupe or Sierra Popoluca were spoken, but we knew something of how they operated. We learned about agglutination in Turkish and Swahili; we worked the notorious Nahuatl phonology problem in which Gleason insisted there were no misprints. Non-majors who wanted to learn something of linguistics might be offered a course called “Languages of the world.” In the guise of a survey of exotic peoples, they might be introduced to some of what linguists have discovered about the differences and similarities among languages and to techniques useful in describing them that might also apply to cultures in general.