Otto Jespersen (1)Besprekingen

I bought this book while still in high school. It was too technical for me then, and remained so when I tried to read it later, when I also realized it was out of date.

This book was a bit of a muddled review of grammar principles. While it was still useful, to some extent, I found that it would be much more useful to people who English is not their first language. Many of the principles and concepts, from moderate education, are already known to any decent reader and writer. Additionally, some of the examples and conceptualizations were archaic in nature. The examples that he provides are decent, but some of them fall off the wayside as he goes into detail about them.

3 stars.

Old fashioned and terribly sexist, but still a classic in the field. If you're not a linguist, remember the field has grown and changed exponentially since this was written. Reading it, one gets to see how to treat language as an object of study in order to analyze it properly

3/12/22

NA