The World's Major LanguagesThis volume features over 50 of the world's languages and language families. The featured languages have been chosen based on the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance. Each language is looked at in depth, and the chapters provide information on both grammatical features and on salient features of the language's history and cultural role. This second edition has been updated and revised. Two new languages, Amharic and Javanese, have been included. This accessible volume will appeal to anyone with an interest in linguistics. Key features:
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Contents
IndoEuropean Languages | |
Germanic Languages | |
John A Hawkins | |
Dutch | |
Latin and theItalic Languages | |
Romance Languages | |
Linda R Waugh and Monique MonvilleBurston | |
Spanish | |
Nigel Vincent | |
Rumanian | |
Slavonic Languages | |
Bernard Comrie | |
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Common terms and phrases
accusative adjectives adverbial Afroasiatic alternation Amharic andthe Arabic auxiliary Bengali Burmese bythe canbe century Chinese clauses clitic Common Slavonic compound conjugation consonant Czech declension derived dialects diphthongs distinction English example feminine forms French fromthe function gender genitive German grammatical Greek Hausa Hebrew historical imperfect indicative IndoAryan IndoEuropean inflectional inthe Iranian Iranian languages isthe itis languages Latin lexical linguistic loanwords marked marker masculine Modern morpheme morphology nasal nominative noun phrase object occur ofthe onthe orthography palatalisation paradigm participle Pashto passive perfect Persian person phonemic phonology plural Portuguese position postpositions prefix prepositions pronouns pronunciation ProtoIndoEuropean represented Romance Rumanian Russian Sanskrit semantic Semitic sentence SerboCroat singular Slavonic Slovak socalled speakers spoken standard stem stress structure subjunctive suffix syllable syntactic syntax Table Tai languages Tamil tense theverb tobe tone tothe Turkish verb verbal vocabulary voiced voiceless vowel withthe word order written