No rips or marks. Cover shows signs of shelf wear. See photos for condition and book contents. This is a very concise, yet thoroughly presented book for home or school. Includes the history of languages, the percentage of the world population that speak the most common languages, a diagram of Indo-European languages how they evolved. It defines terms like "semantics", "phonetics", "phonemics", "phonics", "morphemics", etc. It gives nine different alphabets, including sign language, smoke signals and morse code This book is very nicely laid out, easy to read and understand. Parts of speech such as past perfect tense", "present perfect tense" and "future perfect tense" are defined with examples.