Colloquial Estonian


Book Description

This new edition of Colloquial Estonian is easy to use and completely up-to-date. Specially written by an experienced teacher for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Estonian. No prior knowledge of the language is required. What makes Colloquial Estonian your best choice in personal language learning? interactive – lots of dialogues and exercises for regular practice clear – concise grammar notes practical – useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide complete – including answer key and special reference section. By the end of this rewarding course you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Estonian in a broad range of everyday situations. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download freely in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.




Estonian Grammar


Book Description

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Colloquial Estonian


Book Description

This new edition of Colloquial Estonian is easy to use and completely up-to-date. Specially written by an experienced teacher for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Estonian. No prior knowledge of the language is required. What makes Colloquial Estonian your best choice in personal language learning? interactive – lots of dialogues and exercises for regular practice clear – concise grammar notes practical – useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide complete – including answer key and special reference section. By the end of this rewarding course you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Estonian in a broad range of everyday situations. Accompanying audio material is available to purchase separately on CD/MP3 format, or comes included in the great value Colloquials Pack.




Word-Formation


Book Description

This handbook comprises an in-depth presentation of the state of the art in word-formation. The five volumes contain 207 articles written by leading international scholars. The XVI chapters of the handbook provide the reader, in both general articles and individual studies, with a wide variety of perspectives: word-formation as a linguistic discipline (history of science, theoretical concepts), units and processes in word-formation, rules and restrictions, semantics and pragmatics, foreign word-formation, language planning and purism, historical word-formation, word-formation in language acquisition and aphasia, word-formation and language use, tools in word-formation research. The final chapter comprises 74 portraits of word-formation in the individual languages of Europe and offers an innovative perspective. These portraits afford the first overview of this kind and will prove useful for future typological research. This handbook will provide an essential reference for both advanced students and researchers in word-formation and related fields within linguistics.




The Rough Guide to Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania


Book Description

The Rough Guide to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is your ultimate travel guide to the Baltic States, with inspiring colour photos, clear maps and in-depth descriptions of everything from Tallinn's most atmospheric drinking dens to the countries' finest sandy beaches and the best nature trails. Dip into the full colour introduction to get an idea of the highlights of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The guide itself features definitive accounts of the fascinating capital cities of Tallinn, Vilnius and Riga, as well as full coverage of smaller towns and villages and the distinctive landscapes of lakes, forests and national parks, and practical advice to help your travels run smoothly. It also contains tips on the best places for hiking, canoeing and birdwatching, as well as detailed maps for every region, and up-to-date reviews of accommodation, restaurants and nightlife. Two new-look colour sections give the lowdown on food and drink and the great outdoors. This new edition also features a handy events calendar to help plan your trip across the Baltics to coincide with the best events - there's everything from jazz, ballet, chamber music and film festivals on offer throughout the year - as well as expert background on musical traditions, from the birth of Lithuanian free jazz to Estonia's first punk rock concert. Make the most of your holiday with The Rough Guide to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.




Gender Across Languages


Book Description

This is the fourth volume of a comprehensive reference work which provides systematic descriptions of the manifestations of gender in languages of diverse areal, typological and socio-cultural affiliations. To the 30 languages already analysed in previous volumes, Vol. 4 adds another 12 languages whose gendered structures have received little or no academic attention in the past. Again, the collection includes a broad spectrum of languages: It contains languages with and without grammatical gender, a language with noun classification and a classifier language; larger national languages as well as smaller languages with minority status; and, of course, members of diverse language families, i.e. Indo-European as well as Finno-Ugrian, Iroquois, Tai-Kadai and Niger-Congo. The volume illustrates the tremendous variation found in the area of gender representation across languages. At the same time, it will provide the much-needed material required for an explicitly comparative approach to linguistic manifestations of gender.




The Changing Languages of Europe


Book Description

"Professor Heine and Professor Kuteva look for the causes of linguistic change in cultural and economic exchanges across national and regional boundaries and in the processes that occur when speakers learn or are in close contact with another language. Testing their data and conclusions against findings from elsewhere in the world, the authors reconstruct and reveal when, how, and why common grammatical structures have evolved and continue to evolve in processes of change that will, they argue, transform the linguistic landscape of Europe." "The book is written in clear, non-technical language. It will appeal to scholars and students of language change and variation in Europe and elsewhere. It will also interest everyone concerned to understand the nature of language and language change."--BOOK JACKET.




The Circum-Baltic Languages


Book Description

The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European — Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume I, surveys of dialect areas and language groups bear witness to the immense linguistic diversity in the area with special attention to less well-known languages and language varieties and their contacts.




Circum-Baltic Languages


Book Description

The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European —Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume II, selected phenomena in the grammars of the circum-Baltic languages are studied in a cross-linguistic perspective.




Ideophones


Book Description

The present volume represents a selection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Ideophones held in January 1999 in St. Augustin, Germany. They center around the following hypotheses: Ideophones are universal; and constitute a grammatical category in all languages of the world; ideophones and similar words have a special dramaturgic function that differs from all other word classes: they simulate an event, an emotion, a perception through language. In addition to this unique function, a good number of formal parallels can be observed. The languages dealt with here display strikingly similar patterns of derivational processes involving ideophones. An equally widespread common feature is the introduction of ideophones via a verbum dicendi or complementizer. Another observation concerns the sound-symbolic behavior of ideophones. Thus the word formation of ideophones differs from other words in their tendency for iconicity and sound-symbolism. Finally it is made clear that ideophones are part of spoken language — the language register, where gestures are used — rather than written language.