Patterns of Language: Structure, Variation, Change

I had to read this book for my Intro to Linguistics course, and I thought it did a fairly decent job of going over all the basics. If you don't know anything about linguistics, you might want to take a look at this book, although it would still be helpful to have someone who does know something about it around to explain some things. The author's descriptions of what the phonetic symbols sound like don't always help very much. The organization of this book is a bit odd; the most obvious example is that phonetics isn't discussed in detail until Chapter 5, even though the author makes use of phonetic symbols in the previous chapters. If you read the book from the beginning to the end, you may get a little confused - reading the chapters out of order is practically a must. Also, there are far too many examples. I found myself skimming over a lot, because, after the first example, I understood what was being discussed and didn't need the next page or so of examples. The charts are wonderful, though, and there are a lot of them.