English Vocabulary Elements draws on the tools of modern linguistics to help students acquire an effective understanding of learned, specialized, and scientific vocabulary. This fully refined and updated edition helps develop familiarity with over 500 Latin and Greek word elements in English and shows how these roots are the building blocks within thousands of different words. Along the way, the authors introduce and illustrate many of the fundamental concepts of linguistics, sketch word origins going back to Latin, Greek, and even Proto-Indo-European, and discuss issues around meaning change and correct usage. Moreover, the volume adds new illustrative examples, self-help tests, and study questions. A companion website provides supplementary materials including an Instructor's Manual with an answer key. Offering a thorough approach to the expansion of vocabulary, English Vocabulary Elements is an invaluable resource that provides students a deeper understanding of the language.

English Vocabulary Elements draws on the tools of modern linguistics to help students acquire an effective understanding of learned, specialized, and scientific vocabulary. This fully refined and updated edition helps develop familiarity with over 500 Latin and Greek word elements in English and shows how these roots are the building blocks within thousands of different words. Along the way, the authors introduce and illustrate many of the fundamental concepts of linguistics, sketch word origins going back to Latin, Greek, and even Proto-Indo-European, and discuss issues around meaning change and correct usage. Moreover, the volume adds new illustrative examples, self-help tests, and study questions. A companion website provides supplementary materials including an Instructor's Manual with an answer key. Offering a thorough approach to the expansion of vocabulary, English Vocabulary Elements is an invaluable resource that provides students a deeper understanding of the language.

Writing allows people to convey information to others who are remote in time and space, vastly increasing the range over which people can cooperate and the amount they can learn. Mastering the writing system of one's language is crucial for success in a modern society. This book examines how children learn to write words. It provides a theoretical framework that integrates findings from a wide range of age groups-from children who are producing their first scribbles to experienced spellers who are writing complex words. To set the stage for these discussions, early chapters of the book consider the nature of writing systems and the nature of learning itself. The following chapters review various aspects of orthographic development, including the learning of symbol shapes and punctuation. Each chapter reviews research with learners of a variety of languages and writing systems, revealing underlying similarities. Discussions of how orthography is and should be taught are incorporated into each chapter, making the book of interest to educators as well as to psychologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists. This book is unique in the range of topics and languages that it covers and the degree to which it integrates linguistic insights about the nature of writing systems with discussions of how people learn to use these systems. It is written in a scholarly yet accessible manner, making it suited for a wide audience.

The only textbook of its kind, An Introduction to the Languages of the World is designed to introduce beginning linguistics students, who now typically start their study with little background in languages, to the variety of the languages of the world. It is ideal for use in courses where students have mastered the basic principles of linguistics but lack background in the broad range of language phenomena found in the world's languages, such as vowel harmony and ergative constructions. It offers students an opportunity to explore, at various levels, structures of very different, highly interesting languages without necessarily possessing a speaking or reading knowledge of these languages. Lyovin explains the classification of languages, discussing not only genetic classification but typological and sociolinguistic classification as well. He follows this with an explication of writing systems. A chapter is devoted to each of the world's continents, with in-depth analyses of representative languages of Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America, and a separate chapter covers pidgins and creoles. Helpful features include an appendix of nineteen maps, student exercises, and suggestions for further reading.

Similar words for similar concepts turn up in many widely scattered languages. Some linguists insist that this is simply due to chance while others claim that many if not all of the world's languages descended from a single prehistoric language. Yet neither position in this strident controversy has been analyzed or supported with statistics. New computerized statistical techniques can help determine whether or not words in different languages have an ancestral connection. These flexible techniques are explained, broken into steps, and illustrated in a manner that provides the necessary principles to linguists with no background in statistics.
This methodology measures the probabilistic significance of sound correspondences between short word lists. Many rules of thumb invoked by linguists in order to obviate chance resemblance, such as multilateral comparison and emphasizing grammar over vocabulary, are shown to actually decrease the power of quantitative tests. While the procedures presented here are straightforward, the author also details the extensive linguistic work needed to produce word lists that will not yield nonsensical results. Examples analyze the 200 words in 8 languages that are enumerated and detailed in an appendix.