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Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language

2020-01-07 Language Arts & Disciplines
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Release : 2020-01-07
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 266/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language by : David Shariatmadari

Download or read book Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language written by David Shariatmadari. This book was released on 2020-01-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A linguist’s entertaining and highly informed guide to what languages are and how they function. Think you know language? Think again. There are languages that change when your mother-in-law is present. The language you speak could make you more prone to accidents. Swear words are produced in a special part of your brain. Over the past few decades, we have reached new frontiers of linguistic knowledge. Linguists can now explain how and why language changes, describe its structures, and map its activity in the brain. But despite these advances, much of what people believe about language is based on folklore, instinct, or hearsay. We imagine a word’s origin is it’s “true” meaning, that foreign languages are full of “untranslatable” words, or that grammatical mistakes undermine English. In Don’t Believe A Word, linguist David Shariatmadari takes us on a mind-boggling journey through the science of language, urging us to abandon our prejudices in a bid to uncover the (far more interesting) truth about what we do with words. Exploding nine widely held myths about language while introducing us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics, Shariatmadari is an energetic guide to the beauty and quirkiness of humanity’s greatest achievement.

Word and Language

2010-12-14 Language Arts & Disciplines
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Release : 2010-12-14
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 265/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Word and Language by : Roman Jakobson

Download or read book Word and Language written by Roman Jakobson. This book was released on 2010-12-14. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Empires of the Word

2005-06-28 History
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Release : 2005-06-28
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 860/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Empires of the Word by : Nicholas Ostler

Download or read book Empires of the Word written by Nicholas Ostler. This book was released on 2005-06-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. Yet the history of the world's great languages has been very little told. Empires of the Word, by the wide-ranging linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations in education, culture, and diplomacy devised by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English. Besides these epic ahievements, language failures are equally fascinating: Why did German get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, though the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India? As this book splendidly and authoritatively reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real character of peoples; and, for all the recent tehnical mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term preeminence. The language future, like the language past, will be full of surprises.

Word and World

2004 Language Arts & Disciplines
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Release : 2004
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 445/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Word and World by : Patricia Hanna

Download or read book Word and World written by Patricia Hanna. This book was released on 2004. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book proposes a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein. The authors deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Rather, the link between language and world is a two-stage one, in which meaning is used and in which a natural language should be understood as fundamentally a collection of socially devised and maintained practices. Arguing against the philosophical mainstream descending from Frege and Russell to Quine, Davidson, Dummett, McDowell, Evans, Putnam, Kripke and others, the authors demonstrate that discarding the notion of reference does not entail relativism or semantic nihilism. A provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice, this book will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists, students of communication and all those concerned with the nature and acquisition of human linguistic capacities.

Making and Using Word Lists for Language Learning and Testing

2016-09-08 Language Arts & Disciplines
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Release : 2016-09-08
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 271/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Making and Using Word Lists for Language Learning and Testing by : I.S.P. Nation

Download or read book Making and Using Word Lists for Language Learning and Testing written by I.S.P. Nation. This book was released on 2016-09-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Word lists lie at the heart of good vocabulary course design, the development of graded materials for extensive listening and extensive reading, research on vocabulary load, and vocabulary test development. This book has been written for vocabulary researchers and curriculum designers to describe the factors they need to consider when they create frequency-based word lists. These include the purpose for which the word list is to be used, the design of the corpus from which the list will be made, the unit of counting, and what should and should not be counted as words. The book draws on research to show the current state of knowledge of these factors and provides very practical guidelines for making word lists for language teaching and testing. The writer is well known for his work in the teaching and learning of vocabulary and in the creation of word lists and vocabulary size tests based on word lists.

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