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Babel
If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues? Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', or how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart. Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.
Lingo
Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a poli...
Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, am...
Reading the World
'A brilliant, unlikely book' Spectator How can we celebrate, challenge and change our remarkable world? In 2012, the world arrived in London for the Olympics...and Ann Morgan went out to meet it. She read her way around all the globe's 196 independent countries (plus one extra), sampling one book from every nation. It wasn't easy. Many languages have next to nothing translated into English; there are tiny, tucked-away places where very little is written down; some governments don't like to let works of art escape their borders. Using Morgan's own quest as a starting point, Reading the World explores the vital questions of our time and how reading across borders might just help us answer them. 'Revelatory... While Morgan's research has a daunting range...there is a simple message: reading is a social activity, and we ought to share books across boundaries' Financial Times
European Language Matters
Why do Greek lorries have Metaphorés written on the side? Is it grammatically correct to say 'the best team won' after a football match? What is the difference between manly, male, masculine and macho? Bringing together Peter Trudgill's highly popular columns for the New European, this fascinating collection explores how English has been influenced, both linguistically and culturally, by its neighbouring languages in Europe. English is very much a European language and Trudgill delves in to the rich linguistic legacy that links all European languages. The bite-sized pieces are grouped together in thematically arranged sections, to allow the reader to dip in and out at will, and cover a wide range of topics, from the etymology of words, to illuminating pieces on grammar. Written in an engaging and lively style, and full of intriguing facts about language and languages in Europe, this book will appeal to both language specialists and to general readers with no prior experience.
Polyglot: How I Learn Languages
KAT LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.
A Slap in the Face
n A Slap in the Face, William Irvine undertakes a wide-ranging investigation of insults, their history, the role they play in social relationships, and the science behind them. He offers advice, based primarily on the writings of the Stoic philosophers, on how best to curb our own insulting tendencies and how to respond to the insults that are directed our way. A rousing follow-up to The Good Life, A Slap in the Face will interest anyone who's ever delivered an insult or felt the sting of one--in other words, everyone.
Language Myths
The field of language is one full of misconceptions about the way in which language works, or is used. This collection of essays tackles beliefs, correcting a catalogue of errors such as: aborigines speak a primitive language, French people speak faster and German is ugly.
The View from the Ground
An anthology spanning six decades of on-the-scene journalism from “one of the most eloquent witnesses of the twentieth century” (Bill Buford, Granta). For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn traveled the globe to report on the tumult and extremity of life in the twentieth century. The View from the Ground, as Gellhorn explains, “is a selection of articles written during six decades; peace-time reporting. That is to say, the countries in the background were at peace at the moment of writing; not that there was peace on earth.” Included here are accounts of America during the Depression, Israel and Palestine in the 1950s, post-Franco Spain, protests at the White House, domestic life in Africa, and Gellhorn’s return to Cuba after a forty-one-year absence—among many other topics. Informed by the horrors of fascism in Spain and Germany, the modern terror in Central America, and by the courage of those who stand up to the thugs both in an out of government, The View from the Ground is a singular act of testimony that, like its companion volume, The Face of War, is “an eloquent, unforgettable history of a chaotic century” (San Francisco Chronicle).
Summary of Gaston Dorren's Lingo
Get the Summary of Gaston Dorren's Lingo in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "Lingo" delves into the rich tapestry of European languages, tracing their origins, evolution, and interconnections. It explores the ancient Proto-Indo-European language, the foundation of many modern European and Indian languages, and the efforts of linguists to reconstruct it. The book examines the peculiarities of Finnish and Hungarian, the variations of Romansh, and the Latin roots of French...
