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The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction
This clear and accessible text provides a complete introduction to basic linguistic terms and descriptions of language structures. The German Language Today describes in detail the main liguistic features of the language and the wide variety of speech forms and vocabulary existing within the German-speaking community. It also introduces sociolinguistic and linguistic topics as they relate to the German language, and illustrates them widely with examples. The German Language Today describes the sounds, inflectional processes, syntactic structures, competing forms and different layers of words in the language. Topics covered include: The distribution of German and its dialects The linguistic consequences of German reunification The application of modern linguistic concepts to German, incorporating the findings of the latest German linguistic research. The book has been written with the specific needs of students in mind. It will be invaluable to students of modern German linguistics or modern German society and will be a useful reference resource for postgraduates and teachers of German.
- GenresLinguistics
292 pages, Paperback
First published March 11, 1994
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September 8, 2021
Yes indeed, if you as a potential reader are both willing and also able to take your time (and with taking sufficient time I in fact mean to say spending many weeks if not even months poring over and in detail perusing The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction), and furthermore if you also and very meticulously and methodically were to go through author Charles V.J. Russ’s presented text with a proverbial fine toothed comb to create your own handwritten and as such more user and learner friendly set of extensive and intensive study notes, you might just possibly obtain a decent enough understanding of the history of the German language and what German is like today with regard to phonetics, morphology, grammar, word formation, vocabulary choices and acquisition.
But you in my humble opinion will most definitely require a very large amount of intense reading patience with The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction, since from my own rather frustrated perusal of The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction, what is necessary and essential to learn and to know, to retain about the German language (historically, culturally, linguistically), while this is certainly all textually present, this is also so annoyingly hidden and often deeply buried beneath Charles V.J. Russ’s rambling and at times rather off topic musings (and in particular with regard to German phonetics and grammar points) that you really do need to spend many many hours perusing and importantly also separating the so-called wheat, the required crops from the problematically massive amounts of redundant chaff (and all physically presented in a manner that is hard on the eyes and often fails to focus the reader’s attention on that which is the gist, on that which with regard to the German language is important and essential to know and to know thoroughly).
And thus, although Charles V.J. Russ claims in his preface that The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction has been in particular conceptualised for undergraduate university students and is meant to be a thorough yet also still sufficiently basic and not too complicated introduction, Russ’ often rambling style full of sometimes quite intense verbal diarrhea and that the set-up of in particular the linguistic sections are a bit unorganised and hard to follow, all this takes what should be a decently solid and easily understood text and renders it mostly frustrating and much too problematically time consuming for student readers (who usually have more than one university level class on the go and really cannot spend all their time on one course and on one annoyingly reader unfriendly textbook, which is indeed also why, I would NEVER CONSIDER using The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction for classroom, for teaching use, except perhaps to hand out the simply excellent bibliographies, as the secondary resource materials are the only reason why my rating for The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction is still sitting at two stars).
But you in my humble opinion will most definitely require a very large amount of intense reading patience with The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction, since from my own rather frustrated perusal of The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction, what is necessary and essential to learn and to know, to retain about the German language (historically, culturally, linguistically), while this is certainly all textually present, this is also so annoyingly hidden and often deeply buried beneath Charles V.J. Russ’s rambling and at times rather off topic musings (and in particular with regard to German phonetics and grammar points) that you really do need to spend many many hours perusing and importantly also separating the so-called wheat, the required crops from the problematically massive amounts of redundant chaff (and all physically presented in a manner that is hard on the eyes and often fails to focus the reader’s attention on that which is the gist, on that which with regard to the German language is important and essential to know and to know thoroughly).
And thus, although Charles V.J. Russ claims in his preface that The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction has been in particular conceptualised for undergraduate university students and is meant to be a thorough yet also still sufficiently basic and not too complicated introduction, Russ’ often rambling style full of sometimes quite intense verbal diarrhea and that the set-up of in particular the linguistic sections are a bit unorganised and hard to follow, all this takes what should be a decently solid and easily understood text and renders it mostly frustrating and much too problematically time consuming for student readers (who usually have more than one university level class on the go and really cannot spend all their time on one course and on one annoyingly reader unfriendly textbook, which is indeed also why, I would NEVER CONSIDER using The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction for classroom, for teaching use, except perhaps to hand out the simply excellent bibliographies, as the secondary resource materials are the only reason why my rating for The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction is still sitting at two stars).
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