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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: my book list
In-Reply-To: emenes@orion.it.luc.edu's message of 20 Apr 1995 04:53:39 GMT
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In article <3n4pck$67h@apollo.it.luc.edu> emenes@orion.it.luc.edu
(Edwin P. Menes) writes:

>One brief account of historical linguistics (mid 60's) is Wilfrid Lehman's
>*Historical Linguistics*, definitely a beginner's book.  Anttila is definitely
>not.

Winfred P. Lehmann.  And Anttila's *first* edition was entirely accessible to
the beginner; I'm not sure that the second edition is accessible to experts in
semiotics, much less beginning linguistics students.

>Worth a look because it is foundational in another way is Ferdinand de
>Saussure's *Cours de Linguistique Ge'ne'ral*.  (It's been translated, and he
>didn't really write it; his students compiled it from lecture notes.)  It's a
>source of both Semiotics and Deconstructionism (odd cousins).  It's also the
>source of the laryngeal hypothesis in Indo-European studies.

Taking issue only with the last sentence:  The _Cours_ was originally published
in 1916, after the death of Saussure, and based on notes from a series of
lectures he had presented only a short time before (c. 1914, I believe).  The
laryngeal hypothesis in Indo-European studies is indeed due to Saussure, but is
the result of a monograph published in December, 1878 (and dated 1879), when he
was still a young man; references to this theory in the _Cours_ are by way of
example, not a presentation of previously unknown work.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
