Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Students and teachers of linguistics and English
- General readers interested in the origin and evolution of human language
- Self-learners seeking a systematic overview of general linguistics
- Students preparing course papers who need classic citations
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting light, entertaining language stories and unwilling to engage with theory
- Specialists concerned only with the latest research in contemporary linguistics
- Beginners whose English reading is not yet proficient and who need a Chinese translation
Reading tips
- Start with the table of contents, pick the chapters on topics you care about most, then go back for the rest rather than plowing straight through.
- After each chapter, write a three-to-five-line summary in your own words to check whether you have really grasped the argument.
- Read alongside a contemporary linguistics textbook and note where the book's views differ from modern consensus.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
- 96
- 97
- 98
- 99
- 100
- 101
- 102
- 103
- 104
- 105
- 106
- 107
- 108
- 109
- 110
- 111
- 112
- 113
- 114
- 115
- 116
FAQ
Is this book suitable for complete beginners?
Do I need to read the whole book?
Is there a Chinese translation of the ebook?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) was a prominent Danish linguist whose writings have had a lasting influence on the history of modern linguistics. Two of his works are held in this collection. The first, Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, offers a systematic discussion of the nature of language, its processes of change, and its historical origins, combining theoretical depth with readability. The second, How to Teach a Foreign Language, addresses classroom practice, discussing the principles and methods of foreign-language teaching in a practical spirit. Together they show that his research was concerned both with language itself and with the real problems of language education. Public information is limited, so no biographical details are given here; judged by the works available, his writing is clear and well organized, and he explains complex linguistic phenomena in an accessible way, exerting a continuing influence on later linguistic research and foreign-language teaching.
