Lost me

Lost Languages by P.E.Cleator

What a shock to find a book published in 1959 with a writing style I'd thought disappeared in the last century!  Just listen to this:

    Inasmuch as the active application of language is speech, it is upon speech that writing, essentially a secondary means of communication, is dependent.

I got what he was saying--after a, "Huh? Back up, there," moment.  When I went on to finish the paragraph, what he was saying made sense--basically this:  While written language is cool, it ain't shucks to spoken language. 

First line of book, by the way.  I should have ran away screaming.

But when you get used to the style, it's like poetry.  Phrases like, "...though this did not preclude them from acquiring other wives as well."  Why not, "...stop them from taking"?  Because it's style!

I just hope I'm not talking like that when I finish reading it.   Or in other words, "I am fearful, but beg the apprehension may be ungrounded, that my own oral language will soon acquire the characteristics of the author's pedological one."

Now that's out of my system.  I have to decline to write a meaningful review.  The subject matter was way out of my league.  I couldn't begin to guess if it was accurate or just pure baloney, but all signs indicated accuracy, completeness, and comprehensiveness.  I did gain an appreciation for the difficulty scholars face--if the language is known but the script unknown, or the script known but the language unknown, deci

phering is hard enough.  But how about tackling an inscription of language unknown  and script unknown?  Fun, indeed.