#440 overall
Language Families of Africa
The Great Courses
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2024 · score 1.0
A Great Courses lecture series by linguist John McWhorter on how languages are grouped into families and how they relate to one another. The course is described as covering African languages in particular, which the commenter says he knows well.
The commenter calls it an excellent introduction, noting that McWhorter is an expert on African languages and that his coverage is strong from an introductory standpoint.
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20062026
For some reason the topic of language brings up a lot of folk theories, half truths, and downright errors. This is not a bad thing, I think a lot of people are fascinated by language and want to understand it on a deeper level. There are many excellent books on the topic.if you’re on Audible, I strongly suggest Mc Whorter’s Language Families course: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of.... He’s an expert on African languages and his coverage of those are excellent from an introductory pov.
“My language-teaching polyglot friend Benny Lewis said that if you’ve never really spoken another language, then the best strategy is to start with the easiest possible language to learn, which is Esperanto”
The advice here is very context dependent. Esperanto was based on European languages, so would be easy for a person already speaking one; if not than not. Also, the concept of “easiest possible language” of course is ill-defined and learner dependent. If you’re interested in artificial languages one interesting book is Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language.
If I were pressed to pick an easy to learn language I’d say learn a creole language, which are relatively simplified. This is where Sivers was going with the Swahili idea, I think: although Swahili is not a creole language (https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4lq80i/why_isn...) contact by different populations tend to simplify complex language features. Same can be said about English, perhaps, it’s grammar and gender system is ssiplified but of course there’s the notorious spelling problem.