The World's Major Languages
Bernard Comrie
From English, French, Spanish and Russian to Pashto, Tagalog, and Swahili, this is the first comprehensive reference work to provide detailed information about the world's forty major languages. Written by acknowledged specialists in the field, the volume begins with a general introduction to language and language families, followed by language-family sections that provide an informative essay about that language, and individual chapters that discuss the history, distribution, syntax, grammar and punctuation, writing and spelling systems, standards of usage, and other important aspects of each language.
|
Contents
|
Introduction
|
1 |
|
1 IndoEuropean Languages
|
23 |
|
2 Germanic Languages
|
51 |
|
3 English
|
59 |
|
4 German
|
86 |
|
5 Dutch
|
110 |
|
6 Danish Norwegian and Swedish
|
125 |
|
7 Latin and the Italic Languages
|
145 |
|
28 Hungarian
|
484 |
|
29 Finnish
|
497 |
|
30 Turkish and the Turkic Languages
|
519 |
|
31 Afroasiatic Languages
|
545 |
|
32 Semitic Languages
|
551 |
|
33 Arabic
|
560 |
|
34 Hebrew
|
578 |
|
35 Amharic
|
594 |
|
8 Romance Languages
|
164 |
|
9 French
|
171 |
|
10 Spanish
|
197 |
|
11 Portuguese
|
217 |
|
12 Italian
|
233 |
|
13 Rumanian
|
253 |
|
14 Slavonic Languages
|
269 |
|
15 Russian
|
274 |
|
16 Polish
|
289 |
|
17 Czech and Slovak
|
305 |
|
Bosnian Croatian Montenegrin Serbian
|
330 |
|
19 Greek
|
347 |
|
20 IndoAryan Languages
|
373 |
|
21 Sanskrit
|
380 |
|
22 HindiUrdu
|
399 |
|
23 Bengali
|
417 |
|
24 Iranian Languages
|
437 |
|
25 Persian
|
445 |
|
26 Pashto
|
460 |
|
27 Uralic Languages
|
477 |
|
36 Hausa and the Chadic Languages
|
618 |
|
37 Tamil and the Dravidian Languages
|
635 |
|
38 Tai Languages
|
653 |
|
39 Thai
|
660 |
|
40 Vietnamese
|
677 |
|
41 SinoTibetan Languages
|
693 |
|
42 Chinese
|
703 |
|
43 Burmese
|
724 |
|
44 Japanese
|
741 |
|
45 Korean
|
765 |
|
46 Austronesian Languages
|
781 |
|
47 MalayIndonesian
|
791 |
|
48 Javanese
|
819 |
|
49 Tagalog
|
833 |
|
50 NigerKordofanian Languages
|
857 |
|
51 Yoruba
|
866 |
|
52 Swahili and the Bantu Languages
|
883 |
| 903 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
accusative adjectives adverbial alternation Arabic auxiliary Bengali Budi Burmese century Chinese clause clitic Common Slavonic compound conjugation consonant Czech dative declension derived dialects diphthongs distinction English example feminine forms French fricative function gender genitive German grammar Greek Hebrew imperfect indicative Indo-Aryan Indo-European Indo-European languages inflectional intransitive Iranian Iranian languages Japanese Korean language Latin lexical linguistic loanwords locative marked marker masculine meaning modern morpheme morphology nasal nominal noun phrase object occur palatalisation paradigm participle particle Pashto passive past Persian phonemic phonological plural Portuguese position predicate prefix prepositions pronouns pronunciation Proto-Indo-European reference Romance Rumanian Russian Sanskrit script semantic Semitic sentence singular Slavonic Slovak speakers spoken standard stem stress subjunctive suffix syllable syntactic syntax Table Tai languages Tamil tense third person tone transitive verbs Tuti velar verb verbal vocabulary voiced voiceless vowel word order written