Author: Steve Kaufmann
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1420873296
Category : Linguistics
Languages : en
Pages : 142
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Book Description
The Way of The Linguist, A language learning odyssey. It is now a cliché that the world is a smaller place. We think nothing of jumping on a plane to travel to another country or continent. The most exotic locations are now destinations for mass tourism. Small business people are dealing across frontiers and language barriers like never before. The Internet brings different languages and cultures to our finger-tips. English, the hybrid language of an island at the western extremity of Europe seems to have an unrivalled position as an international medium of communication. But historically periods of cultural and economic domination have never lasted forever. Do we not lose something by relying on the wide spread use of English rather than discovering other languages and cultures? As citizens of this shrunken world, would we not be better off if we were able to speak a few languages other than our own? The answer is obviously yes. Certainly Steve Kaufmann thinks so, and in his busy life as a diplomat and businessman he managed to learn to speak nine languages fluently and observe first hand some of the dominant cultures of Europe and Asia. Why do not more people do the same? In his book The Way of The Linguist, A language learning odyssey, Steve offers some answers. Steve feels anyone can learn a language if they want to. He points out some of the obstacles that hold people back. Drawing on his adventures in Europe and Asia, as a student and businessman, he describes the rewards that come from knowing languages. He relates his evolution as a language learner, abroad and back in his native Canada and explains the kind of attitude that will enable others to achieve second language fluency. Many people have taken on the challenge of language learning but have been frustrated by their lack of success. This book offers detailed advice on the kind of study practices that will achieve language breakthroughs. Steve has developed a language learning system available online at: www.thelinguist.com.
Author: Gretchen McCulloch
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735210942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.
Author: Frederick Bodmer
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393300345
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 724
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Book Description
Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages -- Teutonic, Romance, Greek -- helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a language as it is actually used in everyday life.
Author: Guy Deutscher
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 9781429970112
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.
Author: Anna Marie Trester
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350137979
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
Using insights drawn from the experiences of professional linguists working in a range of domains, this book is an essential resource to help you recognize the value and relevance of your skills and training as a linguist in the job market. No matter where you are in your career – just starting a first job or reflecting back on 30 years – this book provides an interpretive frame for catalyzing momentum around what comes next. Encouraging you to approach your career with agency and curiosity, Anna Marie Trester details the myriad ways that linguists can contribute meaningfully to the world of work. Exploring the connections between linguistics as a field of study and a way of thinking, she details the ways in which the powerful observational and analytical skills and abilities cultivated by a background in linguistics can be employed in a diverse range of professional workspaces. With activities, exercises, and a review of career literature, Employing Linguistics helps you seek and create opportunities as you choose what challenges to focus on next.
Author: Scotto Moore
Publisher: Tordotcom
ISBN: 1250767695
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
“This is a stand-alone novel with material enough for six... By the halfway point, it had blown my mind twice... an audacious, genre-bending whirlwind.” —New York Times “It reads like Snow Crash had a dance-off with Gideon the Ninth, in a world where language isn't a virus from outer space, it's a goddamn alien invasion.” —Charles Stross In modern day Los Angeles, a shadowy faction led by the Governor of California develops the arcane art of combat linguistics, planting the seeds of a future totalitarian empire. Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes"—unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skilfully pronounced. But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping the cabal from toppling California over the edge of a terrible transformation, with forty million lives at stake. Time is short for Isobel to level up and choose a side—because the cabal has attracted much bigger and weirder enemies than the anarchist resistance, emerging from dark and vicious dimensions of reality and heading straight for planet Earth! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author: Tom Brewster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 406
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Book Description
It can be done! You can successfully learn a new language if three conditions are met: 1. You live where the new language is spoken. 2. You are motivated to learn the new language. 3. You know how to proceed with language learning, step-by-step and day-by-day. This manual assumes that the first and second conditions are met. It is a simple guide planned to help you, the learner, proceed without boredom or frustration, through manageable steps, so that you can become proficient in your new language. The objective of this manual is to help guide you in your daily activities of language learning. - Preface.
Author: Gaston Dorren
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190944
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
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 political entity. Lingo takes 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 one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).
Author: Ezequiel A. Di Paolo
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262547864
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language. Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, they show that this continuity extends to language. Expanding and deepening enactive theory, they offer a constitutive account of language and the co-emergent phenomena of personhood, reflexivity, social normativity, and ideality. Language, they argue, is not something we add to a range of existing cognitive capacities but a new way of being embodied. Each of us is a linguistic body in a community of other linguistic bodies. The book describes three distinct yet entangled kinds of human embodiment, organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective; it traces the emergence of linguistic sensitivities and introduces the novel concept of linguistic bodies; and it explores the implications of living as linguistic bodies in perpetual becoming, applying the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, autism, grammar, symbol, narrative, and gesture, and to such ethical concerns as microaggression, institutional speech, and pedagogy.
Author: Maya Honda
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405108312
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Thinking Linguistically is a unique and clearly written introduction to the nature of linguistic analysis and issues in language acquisition. The book is for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, education, and psychology. Through twenty problem sets, based in languages not only from the Americas but from other continents as well, Thinking Linguistically: • Initiates students to the linguists’ way of observing and analyzing data by making the methods and the process of inquiry visible and accessible. • Engages students in analyzing the breadth and depth of two phenomena in a variety of languages—the expression of noun phrase plurality and the formation of questions. • Integrates analysis of these phenomena with results from first and second language acquisition research. • Emphasizes the interface between phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. • Exemplifies how linguistic analysis can be used for the teaching of critical thinking, problem solving, and the nature of scientific inquiry in general. • Is ideal for future language teachers for understanding acquisition and linguistic phenomena
