Pg. 364-408
I do not feel the section describing the methods behind comparing languages and grouping them into language families was very useful to me as a language learner, but it did help me understand the origin Thai as an isolating language, one in which all the words are invariable as opposed to inflecting languages, agglutinative languages, and polysynthetic languages. The book mentions Chinese and Vietnamese as two other isolating languages. If I had to guess this may be a result of East Asia's separation into kingdoms, specifically in Thailand and China, that prevented a transfer of languages across different regions. All of these languages are what the book describes as the "Austro-Asiatic" language family. It is interesting that there is significantly less information in the book and on the internet about the history of the Thai language. The book states, "The relationship between the Tai family and other languages is unclear" (391).
I did find parts of this passage interesting but I don't understand why we were told to stop reading on page 408. The next section titled "How multilingualism works" ties the rest of the reading together by describing how languages connect and merge. Crystal even brings it to a modern day context in the USA.
Rather than delve deeply into how linguistics classify and group languages I would have preferred to learn about Thai's language family specifically and which languages influence it the most so that I might be able to apply it to my language learning activities. It is always useful to have background information on a language whether it is contextual, cultural, political, or historical. Possessing a history of Thai linguistics may help me better understand the modern day words themselves.
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