The Romance Languages (Cambridge Language Surveys)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.30 (828 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0521281393 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 400 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-06-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"this book will undoubtedly take its place among the major works of synthesis on Romance languages." Suzanne Fleischman, Anthropological Linguistics"Posner's The Romance Languages is a work of immense erudition and scholarship which will be most appreciated by those who have some prior knowledge of the history and development of this widespread language family." Marc Picard, Canadian Journal of Linguistics
Her discussion is extensively illustrated with new and original data, and an up-to-date and comprehensive bibliography is included.. What is a Romance language? How is it related to other Romance languages, how did they all evolve, and what can they tell us about language in general? In this comprehensive survey Rebecca Posner, a distinguished Romance specialist, examines this group of languages from a wide variety of perspectives. Her analysis combines philological expertise with insights drawn from modern theoretical linguistics, and relates linguistic features to historical and sociological factors
Romance Languages: A Comprehensive Survey The broad and deep learning in this volume is fitting for its wide subjects, namely, the background and development of the Romance languages. Some of this learning is specialized, to be grasped easily only by the linguist. "One group of words fairly consistently shows displacement of accent--these are proparoxytones with a penultimate short vowel followed by an obstruent + r cluster." Let the layman translate that! Fortunately, other parts of Ms. Posner's learning can be expr. "Disappointed" according to Steven Barbieri. Overall, Ms. Posner gives a broad but shallow overview of how she believes Latin evolved into the Romance languages during the middle ages. Nonetheless, I found several obvious mistakes, which lead me to believe that she had some basic knowledge of some of the languages she used to illustrate her research efforts but not any substantial knowledge in all of the Romance languages as the title might allude. In my opinion, she spends too much time and effort baffling the reader w. Difficult to read if you're not a linguist This book is informative to the point where I find myself having to look up words on almost every page! This book is for those who are familiar with linguistic terms and the like (i.e. palatal, velar, fricative, etc.) If you want a simpler rundown of how the Romance languages are similar and/or different, look elsewhere. This book provides this information, but from a linguists point-of-view. Just keep that in mind.