I just noticed a shiny new book – Mikael Parkvall’s Limits of Language – sitting on a professor’s desk and asked if I could borrow it. Bad habit, I know. But he should know by now to hide interesting books before our meetings.
I’ve been flipping through it for the last half hour, reading bits here and there. And it is, as I say in the post title, a Very Fun Book. It’s full of all sorts of random facts and trivia about language, languages, and linguists. It has a Linguist’s Calendar, a (very funny) Linguists’ Guide to the Galaxy, and chapters on everything from written language to language change to tense, mood, and aspect. It’s not a book to be read cover to cover, but a book to be sampled, read at random, jumped around within. I wish I’d had this book when I was teaching Linguistics 102; it would have been a good supplement to our rather dull course reader.
