Catalog Search Results
Author
Physical Desc
303 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm
Language
English
Description
"Spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences ... [and taking] us into today's remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures. In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In...
Author
Physical Desc
xxiv, 167 pages ; 19 cm.
Language
English
Description
A collection of lectures by the "founder of modern linguistics" discusses fifty years of scientific development in the study of language as he expounds and criticizes a variety of theories. --Publisher's description.
"In clear, precise, and non-technical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty years of scientific development in the study of language, sketching how his own work has implications for the origins of language, the close relations that language...
Author
Physical Desc
360 pages : illustrations, color maps, portraits, charts ; 23 cm
Language
English
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....
Series
Physical Desc
6 videodiscs (approximately 1080 min.) : sound, color ; 4 3/4 in. + 1 guidebook.
Language
English
Description
Language is fascinating. It defines humans as a species, placing us head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators. Professor McWhorter explores many of the common questions about language, such as: Why isn't there just a single language? Or, How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth? In short, everything about a language is eternally and inherently changeable, from its word...
Author
Physical Desc
viii, 289 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
Language
English
Description
"Silvia Ferrara leads a code cracking mission to decipher the hidden truths and histories of our greatest invention--the art of writing"--
Ferrara takes a profound look at how -- and how many times -- human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language around the world. Readers will examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts; study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions, and venture to the...
Author
Physical Desc
324 pages ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
"Everyone likes to think they know a bit about language: There are some words that you simply can't translate into English. The origin of a word tells you how it should be used. A dialect is inferior to a language. The problem is, none of these statements are true. In Don't Believe a Word, linguist David Shariatmadari explodes nine common myths about language and introduces us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics. By the end of...
Author
Physical Desc
63 pages : color illustrations ; 29 cm
Language
English
Description
Did you know that there are nearly 7,000 languages spoken around the world? This book introduces you to a wide variety of different languages to start you off on your language-learning journey. Find out where languages come from and where they are spoken. From Arabic to Zulu, Morse code to whale song, this book is packed with language facts and phrases to help you communicate all around the world. It includes: basic vocabulary and short dialogues...
Author
Physical Desc
ix, 499 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Language
English
Description
Psychologist Pinker explains how the mind works in a completely new way--by examining how we use words. Every time we swear, we reveal something about human emotions. When we use an innuendo to convey a bribe, threat, or sexual come-on (rather than just blurting it out), we disclose something about human relationships. Our use of prepositions and tenses tap into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and our nouns and verbs tap into mental models...
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