The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World
Besides the basic info that all introductory books must have, "The Atlas of the Language" goes a step further, showing what is an amazingly simple and good example of a reconstructed text in Indo-european, the family of languages that generated Latin, Greek and Old Germanic, and thence English. The treatment of other families of languages, like Altaic and Uralic is quite adequate and there the reader has an almost graphic depction of the origins of modern languages like Finnish, Turkish and Corean, for example. The Semitic family of languages, from where comes Hebrew and the Arabic languages is also treated there. Also of importance are the charts that portray in a very easy manner the relationship of all the most important families of languages to the primitive family of unwritten languages spoken some 8.000 years ago
