Kev Nickells's Reviews > Language Made Plain

Burgess is a polyglot, and a very erudite and charming one with it. This book is a series of essays telling a kind of story of linguistics. Necessarily limited (it's only 200 pages) but thoroughly impressive. Burgess talks the reader calmly but clearly through the 'building blocks' of what language is - taking in IPA, ideas arising from proto-Indo-European.

This is a fairly dated book in some senses - certainly there's a tinge of anglocentrism about it - but it's also a charming and clear book, espousing from the science of linguistics some sound political points - later codified in ideas such as functional grammar. There's a bunch of charming linguistic anecdotes - Malay's relationship with rice, great vowel shifts etc.

I can't help but draw comparisons with Peter Ladefoged 'a course in phonetics', which is a great deal more comprehensive in explaining specifically IPA. But this is about as charming a book as you're likely to find on the subject of linguistics - definitely recommend for the wordy uncle or geeky niece.