Books
Ruhlen is the author of several books dealing with the languages of the world and their classifications.
- A Guide to the Languages of the World (1975) provides information on the phonological systems and classifications of 700 languages, prefaced by background information for linguists as well as non-linguists. A greatly expanded version of this work was published in 2005 on the Santa Fe Institute web site.
- A Guide to the World’s Languages, Volume I: Classification (1987) includes classification of the world’s languages; a history and analysis of the genetic classification of languages; and a defense of the controversial taxonomic work of Joseph Greenberg.
- The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue (1994a)
- On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy (1994b). In 1994, Ruhlen published these two books that have similar themes and titles, but are directed at different audiences. The former book, directed at laypersons, includes exercises in which the readers are invited to classify languages themselves using Greenberg's technique, known variously as "mass comparison" and "multilateral comparison". The latter book is aimed at linguists and maintains that some of the assumptions current among historical linguists are incorrect. One of these assumptions is that the only valid criteria for determining a language family are regular sound correspondences and the reconstruction of its protolanguage. According to Ruhlen, these steps can only be carried out after the fact of familyhood has been established by classification.
Read more about this topic: Merritt Ruhlen
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (16081674)
“With a few exceptions, the critics of childrens books are remarkably lenient souls.... Most of us assume there is something good in every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.”
—Katharine S. White (18921977)
“The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (17721801)