Richard A. Hudson

A short book, but delightfully packed with cogent & concise descriptions (and opinions) of the concept of Linguistics and what is included in the study of Linguistics. It's aimed at people who are interested in the various sides of language: history, structure, function, etc.; and want to know what is covered by the overarching concept of "communication" and how it's taught at the university level--with some side comments about how it often is mistaught at the pre-university level. What you may appreciate most is the friendly, just-between-you-and-me, style of the book which completely drew me in and allowed me to understand and follow what might otherwise appear as very erudite topics. Hudson is not trying to convince us of anything, other than it’s worth the look see; he merely presents the topics of the discipline and explains the kinds of efforts that you will have to make in order to succeed in the business. He also admits, quite frankly, that there isn't much money to be made as a pure Linguistics expert. Nor many opportunities for paying work. But, even so, there's much to be gained on a practical level for the mental efforts that studying Linguistics will teach you that you can then use in so many other, different, milieus—consider the obvious benefits that might accrue to someone studying Information Technology: AI, hacking/cracking, translation, data analyzation & interpretation, etc. And politics, and writing, and teaching, and etc.

I’ve recently started studying Russian and immediately recognized some of the practical observations from this book, i.e. that different languages use different word order and “affixes” to say the same thing. I learned that “in the restaurant”—which begins with the preposition “in”--translates in Russian to a phrase that begins with the prefix “v”, continues with the word for restaurant and then ends with the suffix “y”. In other words, where we use 3 words to state where we will eat, Russian has one word that contains the same information. This kind of information certainly will help me to learn the new language more easily.… (more)