Linguistics

My interests in linguistics are primarily used for natural language processing work. On this page I just publish some references to linguistic items in general.

General thoughts on linguistics

There are quite some good general books on linguistics that are very interesting for both lay people and linguists who are not specialised on those topics. The Unfolding of Language is a very compelling book about language evolution in general.

The Horse, The Wheel And Language by David Anthony is a wonderful book to understand how Indo-European languages might have originated.

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species is already and old but still intellectually stimulating book on the very origins of human language within the realms of humans' evolution.

Stanislas Dehaene's book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics is more on mathematics and the brain but it touches language for number processing.

If you really want to get a glimpse into language and brain processing, you can go to Eric Kandel's Principles of Neural Science and read the chapters on language and learning - but that book is a general introduction and probably contains more than what most non-neurologists would like to know about the topic.

Language learning

Linguistics and learning languages are two different although definitely related kettles of fish. Learning and keeping afresh more than one language is time-consuming, so one definitely needs to develop good strategies to optimize one's resources. Below you can see some of the ideas and language resources I have found useful.

Genre	Title	Description
General suggestions	Lomb's How I learn languages	This is one of Kathó Lomb's book about how to master several languages
Chinese	Growing up with Chinese	This is for beginners
Chinese	Le Chinois de tous les jours	Also for beginners, it is just a good phrasebook with real phrases. It has the Chinese sentence, pinyin and French translation. You can download the audio
German	Radio Wissen	Public online radio about cultural and scientific things
Norwegian	Norwegian-English Dictionary: A Pronouncing and Translating Dictionary of Modern Norwegian (Bokmal and Nynorsk) (ISBN 978-0299038748)	Probably the best Norwegian-English dictionary, somewhat outdated
Norwegian	Norwegian Practical Dictionary (ISBN 978-0781811064)	There are few decent English-Norwegian dictionaries out there. This one is both ways and although there are some words I have missed, it is fairly decent and has quite some information on collocations.
Russian	Oxford Russian Dictionary (ISBN 978-0198614203)	There are very few decent Russian dictionaries out there and this is the best I have been able to come up with for the English-Russian pair
Russian	Novaja Gazeta	This is a fairly known Russian newspaper, good when comprehension levels are already high
Russian	Snob	You can find interesting stuff about culture, science in general