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:
“There was books too.... One was “Pilgrim’s Progress,” about a man that left his family it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)