Review: Discovering Language

Discovering Language by Thomas Nash
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So this is a textbook, complete with exercises at the end of each chapter. It is a Linguistics primer, and the target audience is English speaking students in Taiwan. Taking all this into account, it is a rather interesting book, especially if English and Chinese are two of your languages. 3 stars, but rounded up to 4 because I should have know it would be a normal textbook ahead of time.

Some interesting notes:
- Words with /sl/ are said to convey unpleasant associations (slime, slither, slug, sloppy, etc.)
- Most words ending in -ump suggest heaviness and bluntness (rump, dump, hump, mump, lump, chump, thump, bump)
- The section on the different ways of being polite for Americans vs. Chinese (P. 55)
- The p's in the words "pit" and "spit" are pronounced differently, though English speakers do not normally realize this.
- Relatively new in-fix in English: "ma" (as in edu-ma-cation)
- Peoples' names have become common words: lumberjack, jack of all trades, Tomboy, tomcat, jimmy open
- 蒙古大夫 for a quack
- Languages with inclusive and exclusive "we": Taiwanese, Quechua, Tok Pisin, Hawaiian
- "gamel" became gamble. Same process added "d" to thunder and tender, and "p" to empty
- "Dog" used to mean a certain breed, and "hound" meant all breeds of dogs. Now the opposite.
- Silly used to mean Happy, then naive, now Foolish.
- Want used to mean "lack"


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