Reviews for Facts And Values

The average rating for Facts And Values based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-27 00:00:00 Sharyl Targgart In this book, Christopher J. Pountain traces the changes that the Spanish language has undergone over the last millennium-plus by closely examining selected texts. He starts with a late Latin/early Romance letter from the Visigothic period (possibly 7th century) and the following texts bring us all the way to transcribed speech of the late 20th century. The texts cover not just Spanish of Spain and several Latin American countries, but also Judeo-Spanish (a.k.a. Ladino), Caló the argot of Spain's gypsy community, the Spanish of peoples of African descent in the New World and in Equatorial Guinea, and finally a couple of Spanish-based creoles. Though most texts here are from official registers or works of literature, which may perpetuate archaic usages and are not fully reflective of contemporary speech, Pountain zeros in on the signs of language change. For works from the "Golden Age" of Spanish letters (16th and 17th centuries) he also favours writers working for the standardization of the language, as they mention variant forms and perceived mistakes in the speech of the society around them. Similarly, Pountain shows a predilection for urban writers who attempt to capture the speech of various social classes and professions in their city. Each text is followed by an English translation, and then a commentary by which Pountain points out the phonological, morphological, and lexical changes evident within. Instead of repeatedly describing the same phenomenon in detail, he generally refers the reader to a series of keypoints located at the end of the book, such as "the f > h change", "future and conditional", "palatalization", and so forth. In order to trace the history of Spanish, one would have to drawn on, among languages, Latin, Arabic, French, Italian, and even Romani. Pountain shows a mastery of this data, and this book is extremely rich in the sort of etymological trivia that delights historical linguistics buffs. A good command of Spanish is advisable, however; though Pountain provides an English translation for each of the text selections, he does not translate all shorter Spanish-language quotations. I really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in Spanish specifically or the Romance languages in general.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-15 00:00:00 Kaka Kapol I started to read this textbook as an introduction to current work in syntactic theory by Chomsky known as the Minimalist Program. I have tried the author Andrew Radford before (I have read most of his books on syntactic theory starting with his 1981's Transformational Syntax: A Student's Guide to Chomsky's Extended Standard Theory- which is not enlisted here in Goodreads), and I like his way, it helps me especially as I have to read on my own without any help from an instructor.