Author: Frederick Bodmer
Pages:  704
ISBN:   039330034X

The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages is at its heart a history of language book. It shows the origin of lanuage, how languages evolved, how they are related. But it is not just a history of language for history’s sake. The purpose of showing and explaining this history is to help the reader learn languages. The book claims that learning the evolution of a language and how it relates to other languages will make it easier to learn since it will be easier to connect it to a lanugage you already know.

The Loom of Language appendices contain basic vocabularies for Teutonic languages (Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and German) and Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). They are divided by word type (nouns, division of time, numerals, adjective, verbs, adverbs, and social usage phrases).

It is stressed in the introduction that these word lists aren’t simply statistically the most used words, but a carefully hand-picked set of words that will allow you to communicate in the language. The word frequency lists in other books are full of irrelevant synonyms and derivatives of basic words that are a waste of time to learn off the bat. The author also argues for the importance of learning the essential particles (I like to call them the “little” words): pronouns, conjunctions, directives, prepositions first as it is hard to understand or communicate without them. The book also contains essential grammar, but in a comparative, evolutionary format.

This is a wordy book. It’s not an easy read, but it is fascinating. The Loom of Language is unlike any other book in that it isn’t a “learn spanish” book, but a learn language book that throws ten languages at you at once, including many other examples of ancient languages. It’s definitely worth reading if you’re studying a teutonic or romance language.