Böcker i Dover Language Guides-serien

Icelandic is closer to the speech patterns of the Middle Ages than any living European language, making this volume invaluable to students and scholars of Old Icelandic and English culture and history.

Far and away the most useful analysis of characters for beginner, intermediate student. 1,000 most important characters analyzed according to primitives, phonetics, historical development. Traditional method offers mnemonic aid to students of Chinese and Japanese.

Practical and reliable, this reference traces English words back to their Indo-European roots. Each entry features a brief definition, identifies the language of origin, and employs a few illustrative quotations. An extensive appendix includes lists of prefixes, suffixes, Indo-European roots, homonyms and doublets, and the distribution of English-language sources.

How do culture and language correspond? How does language work, and how do languages vary? An expert linguist and anthropologist addresses these and related issues in a highly readable examination of language within the contexts of thought, historical process, race, culture, and art. Topics include a discussion of "drift," or the processes of language change.