ABSTRACT

First Published in 2005. This is a work remarkable for its scholarship, originality and independence of though. As an introduction to philology it has never been surpassed in terms of combining scholarship or accessibility. Anyone who loves words or who is at all curious about language will appreciate this book, covering as it does all the ground from every useful angle. A level headed and erudite study.

chapter |12 pages

The Origin of Language 1

part I|54 pages

Sounds

chapter I|15 pages

The Sound Mechanisms 1

chapter II|18 pages

Phonetic Systems and Their Transformations

chapter III|19 pages

The Phonetic Word and the Verbal Image

part II|101 pages

Grammar

chapter I|17 pages

Words and Morphemes

chapter II|25 pages

The Grammatical Categories

chapter III|22 pages

Different Kinds of Words 1

chapter IV|18 pages

Affective Language

chapter V|17 pages

Morphological Mutations 1

part III|58 pages

Vocabulary

chapter I|17 pages

The Nature and Extent of Vocabularies 1

chapter II|20 pages

How the Meaning of Words is Modified 1

chapter III|19 pages

How the Terms that Express Ideas are Changed

part IV|81 pages

The Structure of Languages

chapter I|12 pages

Language and Languages

chapter II|15 pages

Dialects and Specialized Languages 1

chapter III|20 pages

Standard or Common Languages

chapter IV|17 pages

The Mutual Influence of Languages 1

part V|31 pages

Writing

chapter I|16 pages

Origin and Development of Writing 1

chapter II|13 pages

The Written Language and its Spelling

chapter |16 pages

The Progress of Language