Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?
I recently finished _An Introduction to Linguistic Typology_, by Viveka Velupillai. It does a great job of summarizing areas of linguistics at the beginning of each chapter, giving readers a good refresh of basic linguistics, followed by extensive examples of the variety of strategies employed by languages across the world. The examples are taken from a truly wide variety of languages, many of which I had never heard of, and there's also extensive discussion of statistical tendencies seen in surveys of a wide swath of languages. The different tendencies found in pidgins/creoles are also treated extensively, and each chapter even has a section on sign languages, which are unfortunately still massively understudied.<p>Overall it felt like an intro to linguistics course book but on steroids. It was really great for widening my exposure beyond the economically powerful languages that are usually the focus of analysis.