Showing titles in Linguistics

As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia, by the Black Sea. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family, the thread that connects disparate cultures: Dante’s Inferno to the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen?

David Korten argues that global corporate consolidation of power is but one manifestation of what he calls "Empire" ¿ the organization of society by hierarchies of dominance that have held sway for the past 5,000 years. Empire has always resulted in misery for the many and fortune for the few. Now it threatens the very future of humanity. The Great Turning traces the ancient roots of Empire and charts its long evolution from monarchies to the transnational institutions of the global economy.

This novel tells the story of impoverished, embarrassment-prone Archibald "Archie" Moffam and his difficult relationship with his art-collecting, hotel-owning, millionaire father-in-law, Daniel Brewster, the father of Archie's new bride, Lucille. Archie's attempts to ingratiate himself with Brewster only get him further into trouble. The story takes place in New York City.

"Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" is an epic poem by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published in 1847. The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel, set during the time of the expulsion of the Acadians. The idea for the poem came from Longfellow's friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Longfellow used dactylic hexameter, imitated from Greek and Latin classics, though the choice was criticized.

During a high society party set in New York City in the early 1900s, a beautiful woman is murdered and her precious diamond stolen. A young woman attending the party had just accepted a marriage proposal from a handsome young man. Unfortunately, the young man is the prime suspect in the murder due to circumstantial evidence. From there, the story takes many twists and turns before the identity of the killer is finally revealed.

This charming novel, one of Trollope's most popular, is full of love and laughter. Will Frank Gresham, heir to an impoverished estate, marry penniless Mary Thorne despite the protests of all of his family? Should Doctor Thorne divulge a secret that may make all of the difference?

Richard Burton reads Shakespeare's narrative poem about the legendary Lucretia (or 'Lucrece'). The poem tells the story of the Roman leader Tarquin's rape of Lucrece and her subsequent suicide.

A celebration of the huge linguistic diversity that is open to all of us at birth, and that has inspired and fascinated humans since the invention of speech. The acclaimed novelist Sophie Hardach - a German native who writes in English - explores languages, and multilingualism, as an expression of human creativity and identity, and a way to connect in an often fractured world - a necessary and important pursuit in these politically divided times.

“Los niños que terminen pueden ir al recreo”, dice la maestra. Julia se queda sentada en su pupitre hasta que le explican que con “niños” la maestra se refiere también a las niñas. Más tarde, en gimnasia, el profesor dice: “Los niños que quieran formar parte del equipo de fútbol que levanten la mano”. Julia alza la mano, pero el profesor, incómodo, le dice que se refería solo a los niños. Julia está estupefacta; no entiende nada. Como la niña de esta anécdota, todas las mujeres tienen que aprender a deducir desde pequeñas cuándo están incluidas y cuándo no en el masculino genérico.

What was Anthony Trollope's favorite Anthony Trollope book? Which was the most difficult for him to write? When he settled down by the fire for a good read, whose books did he choose? What nonliterary profession occupied him for much of his life? Learn the answers to these and other questions as one of the great authors in literature takes you on a guided tour of his personal and literary life.

The timid and cowardly Henry Jones alone knows the whereabouts of a second will, which disinherits him from his uncle's property. During his guilt throes he arouses the suspicions of all around him.

L. Frank Baum called this and The Wizard of Oz his two best books! A magic umbrella transports Trot, Buttonbright, and Cap'n Bill to an island in the sky inhabited by the Blues, the Pinks, and the evil Boolooroo.

Where There’s a Will is Mary Roberts Rinehart’s hilarious comedy involving a health spa, an heir, a would-be princess, and an impostor. The story is told by Minnie, who has essentially run the spa for years and inherited the care of its famous spring from her father. When the old doctor dies and leaves the Hope Springs Spa to his near-do-well grandson with the stipulation that he live on premises for two months in order to inherit, the grandson is nowhere to be found. So Minnie tries to save the spa by enlisting the help of family and friends to trick the lawyer....

The double-act of Bertie Wooster and his faithful, omniscient butler Jeeves is the greatest comic pairing in literature. Millions of fans worldwide have laughed at the travails of bumbling Bertie and delighted at the felicitous solutions devised by Jeeves to extricate his master from 'the soup'. In this story Bertie Wooster finds himself on a losing streak and lands himself at the mercy of his aunts, Dahlia and Agatha, and only Jeeves is capable of extricating him from disaster.

The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of computers, research has focused on the design of digital machine translation tools - computer programs capable of automatically translating a text from a source language to a target language. This has become one of the most fundamental tasks of artificial intelligence.

After the death of his mother, Neewa the black bear cub, is captured by Challoner, the woodsman. Neewa soon learns that the woodsman and his Husky pup, Miki, are his friends. The bear and the dog become inseparable playmates. But their fun and games become of secondary importance when Challoner’s canoe overturns in river rapids causing the two to become separated from Challoner and finally responsible for their own survival in the wilderness.

Michael O'Halloran is the charming Gene Stratton-Porter novel of an orphaned newspaper seller who asks nothing of the world except to "be square". The book presents a vivid description of American life in 1914 and, though the characters suffer many hardships, the overall tone is so upbeat that it's easy to see why this book outsold Pollyanna in 1916. Stratton-Porter's skills as a naturalist make the country scenes especially vibrant. Her ear for dialogue is unsurpassed, demonstrating to the listener that, if life in America wasn't like this, it should have been.

The Future of Language distinguishes myth from reality and superstition from scientifically based prediction as it plots out the importance of language and raises questions about its future. From the rise of artificial intelligence and speaking robots, to brain implants and computer-facilitated telepathy, language and communications expert Philip Seargeant surveys the development of new digital ‘languages’ and investigates how conventions of spoken and written language are being modified by new trends in communication.

In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named “Nim Chimpsky” in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim’s teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed - not because Nim couldn’t create sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words.

¡No se aburra! es un compendio de juegos de palabras que provienen de la tradición oral latinoamericana. Se trata de un libro muy divertido que propicia el juego con el lenguaje.