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Author
Language
English
Formats
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
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy offers insights on such varied yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, Helen Keller, Semioticism, and the incredible Delta Factor. Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us."--Publisher description.
Author
Language
English
Description
"Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's tight South Philly kitchen, "frizzy hair cut short, bangs teased into stiff clouds, sweat glistening in the summer fog, pamper-butt babies weaving between legs." Quiara was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and the unspoken stories of the barrio -- even as she tried to find her own voice in the...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Who changed the sex of God? This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Formats
Description
As a young anthropologist, Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can't study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely. Here he...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Welcome to Susanna Janssen's wondrous world of words. In Wordstruck! you'll find a wealth of entertaining reflections on language full of humor, imagination, and insight. Anything goes, from the genius of Shakespeare to the unintentional hilarity of linguistic faux pas; from musings on the bilingual brain to the poignant humor of her "Life in Words"; from translations gone riotously bad to English learners tortured by our mother tongue's inconstant...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"In this incisive blend of personal narrative and deep philosophical and linguistic inquiry, journalist, filmmaker, and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner identifies a linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. "Ethnocide," first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term genocide), describes the systemic erasure of a people's ancestral culture. Dating back to the cross-Atlantic slave trade and...
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
Tibetan
Description
In many Tibetan communities, the loss of Tibetan language has reached a crisis level. An elder generation is passing away, leaving behind fewer young Tibetans who can understand their own native language. The trend is most accelerated in villages at the outer edges of the Tibetan cultural sphere, where Chinese has become the dominant language of business and education. Hualong County, whose name translates to "Valley of the Heroes", is one such community....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow spent a decade traveling back and forth to Paris as well as living there. Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect Jean-Benoit and Julie chronicle the lessons they learned after they returned to France to live, for a year, with their twin daughters. They offer up all the lessons they learned and explain,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Taking readers on a rollicking ride through history, a master storyteller and reporter, whose legend began in journalism, presents a paradigm-shifting argument that speech, not evolution, is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements"--NoveList.
"Before Tom Wolfe was a bestselling novelist, he was a groundbreaking journalist. Now the maestro storyteller turns his attention to the mystery behind the creation of his own most important...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"Quiara Alegria Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's North Philly kitchen. She was awed but haunted by the secrets of the family and the untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering of powerful Orisha-like...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
Español
Description
"Inspirándose en hechos y personajes reales, la autora ha escrito una novela inolvidable que se publica en más de treinta países y que ha entusiasmado a los lectores y a la prensa. Oxford, finales del siglo xix. Huérfana de madre e irremediablemente curiosa, Esme crece en un mundo de palabras. Escondida debajo del escritorio de su padre, uno de los lexicógrafos del primer Diccionario Oxford, rescata las fichas de las palabras que se han extraviado...
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