Advice Comparative Grammar Romance Languages

[Sonjaconjota]

I've asked this question in my log but haven't got any feedback yet, so I thought I might repost this here:

Today I would like to ask for some advice. I’m thinking about buying a comparative grammar for Romance languages. Mikhail Petrunin has written several. I’m considering two of them:
- The comparative grammar of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French would be great because I would be able to compare French and Italian, which I speak at an intermediate level, to my strongest Romance language, Spanish. But I’m afraid that Portuguese, which I don’t speak and don’t plan to learn in the future, will add some confusion. (Unless maybe I give the book a make-over with some serious Tippex action ...)
- The comparative grammar of Italian and French would be great to compare my two weakest Romance languages, which I need the most help with, and the book is also a bit cheaper than the other one. But I guess I would miss out on the opportunity to mentally attach things to Spanish.

Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions? Maybe someone could show me a couple of photos of the inside of the two books. I’ve seen a bit of the bigger one in a video by Mikhail Petrunin, but some additional information wouldn’t hurt, especially about the smaller one.

[tritiumoxide]

I have the ePub version of the one for 4 languages, and I got to see a preview of the 5-language version that includes Catalan while I was subscribed to his Patreon. Overall, it's a great book, but there are quite a few errors for my taste, and they seem to be disproportionately well-represented in Italian. See the errata here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vfk ... Zmbq8/edit I have some hope that the majority of them will be addressed in his upcoming update to the 4-language version (release date unknown) as well as the 5-language version due out later this year.

While I understand your concern about the "extra" language (it's so close that is messes with my Spanish too), I strongly suspect that you would still get the most clarity and least confusion out of the 4-language version over the 2-language one. The tables are all relatively consistent in that they list the languages in the following order: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, English (where applicable, though it's sometimes the first column when it serves as a kind of row label), so you have your strongest Romance language along the left, and you have the Portuguese column as a separator that can rather easily be blocked out or ignored. Non-tabular examples are also listed in that order, though not as simple to block out, but still not impossible to skip visually. The Amazon "Look Inside" preview is more extensive for the Kindle version (which is a print facsimile anyway) and you can see good examples of both easily enough, so I will just leave the link to that rather than making screenshots or trying to copy and paste: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F5P6H8T/ (I also found a full scan of the print edition on Archive.org which I won't link, but it might be helpful for skimming and spot-checking.) All of the subsections where Portuguese is addressed directly are separated out and have Portuguese clearly listed in bold in the section heading. Visually, I find the sections easy to see when skimming and can skip over a section and find the next without getting lost. I will also say that this layout makes it easier to skip languages than, say, the treatment of the Romance languages in Bodmer's Loom of Language (though this book's goal is much broader, to open up all of the Romance and Germanic languages through their bastard child, English, so skipping parts is not in the desired path). Overall, while only my opinion, I suspect the ability to rather easily compare everything to Spanish affords more than enough benefits to counter the skipping of unnecessary parts.

All that being said, I feel inclined to mention that for people like myself who love to see the bigger picture and the patterns behind the patterns, I greatly enjoyed going through Joshua Rudder's The Grammar of Romance, which is hard to find in print these days, but it can be borrowed from Archive.org here: https://archive.org/details/grammarofromance0000unse He also made a series of videos that serve as a nice intro to it as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6gEDVV ... 0337CE3F3D Yes, this is the NativLang guy. His book attempts to look at all of the Romance languages comparatively through the lens of their common ancestor, a reconstructed form of Late Vulgar Latin. I know some people are turned off by reconstructed proto-languages, but in this case I find it particularly satisfying in that the reconstruction is what it is exactly because it's what's in common among them all, leaving a series of systematic shifts to get down to the modern spoken varieties and sub-varieties. In other words, it's a hierarchical comparative grammar rather than a flat one like Mikhail's.

Edit: I just decided to check the above errata against the Kindle preview for the French & Italian one which came out a year later (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RN2JPKN), and I did see the first few were addressed in the 2-language version. Though the errata document has updates well past what could be caught in a 2019 printing, so it might still be better to go with the 4-language version and either wait for the updated edition or go through and apply the errata by hand, I just felt I should add this additional caveat. Also, I just noticed that you're in Barcelona and your Catalan is at a similar level to your Spanish, so perhaps that's another check for the 5-language edition.

[Cainntear]

I have never read it, and so this is just me airing my suspicions, not making any accusations.

In theory, I think this is a great idea, because building knowledge in reusable chunks and reusing existing knowledge to learn related new knowledge is great -- it's what we do anyway, so making it explicit is good.

However, the first danger flag is the fact that it's self-published: a book published through a traditional publishing house would be put through a rigorous review process involving subject-matter experts. What happens when the review process is skipped? You get a book published full of errors, and you get a big errata document after the fact highlighting those errors... and this has already happened. Some people might call this "democratisation", but that's just bad-mouthing democracy in my view. Instead of paying people to detect errors before selling the book, you're leaving it to the people who buy the book to tell you about your errors. Yeuch.

Then there's the way the blurb calls on the rhetoric of the lingobros and heavily personalises the whole thing -- "me", "I", "me", "I". It's selling you a guru, not a book.

The other thing that I'm very concerned about is the fact that it appears to be targeted at absolute beginners to all of the languages, which is a bit of an ideological thing that seems to be about the topic of his PhD -- according to Amazon's author details, his thesis was about teaching languages through comparison, and that's really not an idea that has gained much ground in the decade since. The fact that his book is pushing his own theories is not a bad thing really, but the fact that the blurb is so focussed -- fixated, even! -- on this calls into question its usefulness outside of that.

From a business perspective, there are likely to be a lot of self-teachers who've already done two Romance languages who would be a quick win for sales... yet he isn't actively pulling them in. If he said "whether you've already learned one or two or are starting from scratch, this will speed up the process", a lot of people would buy it; the fact that he hasn't said that is tacitly stating that it won't be much use to people who already have a background in a Romance language or two. People will not look inside, so they will miss the bit where he says "It is designed not only for beginners... but also intermediate and advanced students" and the fact that that's not mentioned in the blurb weakens the claim.

So then I'm sitting thinking of him as an ideologue with a fixation on a preconcieved truth, and then I come across the page in the introduction (through Amazon's "Look Inside") and there's a table in the introduction showing you how similar the languages are by showing important verbs, but "have" is avoir (FR), avere (IT)... and then he's chosen to present the Spanish and Portoguese as "haber" and "haver" with "tener" and "ter" in brackets. I mean, I get that he's trying to show similarities and the fact that Iberian Romance took the verb "to hold" and used it as "to have" can kind of obscure that, but if he's demonstrating an important truth with a salient lie, that's not exactly confident-inspiring.

[Sonjaconjota]

Thank you for your input, tritiumoxide and Cainntear!
I guess I'll probably wait for the version including Catalan to come out.