Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Formats
Description
A tour of the world's twenty most-spoken languages explores the history, geography, linguistics, and cultures that have been shaped by languages and their customs.
"English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 or so billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages....
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
Sophie Hardach is here to guide us through the strange and wonderful ways that humans have used languages throughout history. She takes us from the earliest Mesopotamian clay tablets and the 'book cemeteries' of medieval synagogues to the first sounds a child hears in their mother's womb and their incredible capacity for language learning. Along the way, Hardach explores the role of trade in transmitting words across cultures and untangles riddles...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"We gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender affect this social identity, but one overlooked factor can be even more powerful: the way we speak. As pioneering psychologist Katherine Kinzler reveals in How You Say It, that's because our speech largely reflects the voices we heard as children. We can change how we speak to some extent, whether by "code-switching" between dialects or learning a new language. But for...
Author
Pub. Date
2010.
Language
English
Description
Part travelogue and part scientist's notebook, The Last Speakers is the poignant chronicle of author K. David Harrison's expeditions around the world to meet with last speakers of vanishing languages. The speakers' eloquent reflections and candid photographs reveal little-known lifeways as well as revitalization efforts to teach disappearing languages to younger generations. Thought-provoking and engaging, this unique book illuminates the global language-extinction...
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Edition
First edition.
Language
English
Description
The word bitch conjures many images for many people, but it is most often meant to describe an unpleasant woman. Even before its usage to mean a female canine, bitch didn't refer to gender at all--it originated as a gender-neutral word meaning genitalia. A perfectly innocuous word devolving into a female insult is the case for tons more terms, including hussy--which simply meant housewife--or slut, which meant an untidy person and was also used to...
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned...
Author
Pub. Date
2024.
Edition
First edition.
Language
English
Description
"From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet. Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and-because many have never been recorded-when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin,...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Edition
First edition.
Language
English
Description
"A bestselling linguist takes us on a lively tour of how the English language is evolving before our eyes and why we should embrace this transformation and not fight it. Language is always changing -- but we tend not to like it. We understand that new words must be created for new things, but the way English is spoken today rubs many of us the wrong way. Whether its the use of literally to mean "figuratively" rather than "by the letter" or the way...
Author
Series
Very short introductions volume 525
Pub. Date
2017.
Edition
First edition.
Language
English
Description
The languages of the world can be seen and heard in cities and towns, forests and isolated settlements, as well as on the internet and in international organizations like the UN or the EU. How did the world acquire so many languages? Why can't we all speak one language, like English or Esperanto? And what makes a person bilingual? Multilingualism, language diversity in society, is a perfect expression of human plurality. About 6,500-7,000 languages...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
What exactly does it mean for two languages to coexist in the same brain? How do babies exposed to different languages differentiate between them? And how does cognitive decline affect the two languages? Bilingualism is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception as more than half of the world's population is able to communicate in more than one language. In The Bilingual Brain, leading expert Albert Costa guides us through the latest research...
Author
Pub. Date
[2012]
Language
English
Description
Whether it's brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is fundamentally a tool for conveying meaning-a uniquely human magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost thoughts pop up in someone else's mind. You can use it to talk about all sorts of things-from your new labradoodle puppy to the expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer's backhand to things that don't exist at all,...
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