Language Arts & Disciplines - Linguistics - Historical & Comparative
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Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology"[A] combination of readability with scholarship. . . of exceptional quality." --American Library Association (Reference Books Bulletin)As all lovers of language know, words are the source of our very understanding of ourselves and the world around us.Often, however, our use of language is so...
- $78.57 USD
$131.99 USD- $78.57 USD
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Bookish Words & Their Surprising StoriesTravel through time with words that have shaped the trajectory of the English language across centuries. The world of books has played a striking role in the history of English vocabulary. "Book" itself is one of the oldest words in the language, originating from...
- $50.00 USD
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Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American EnglishA spot-on guide to how and why Americans have become so bloody keen on Britishisms--for good or ill The British love to complain that words and phrases imported from America--from French fries to Awesome, man!--are destroying the English language. But what about the influence...
- $42.77 USD
$81.99 USD- $42.77 USD
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I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World"Sherlock Holmes could glance at a bowler hat and tell that its owner's wife had ceased to love him. In this brilliant book about metaphor James Geary is no less astonishing, as he deciphers the subtle implications embedded in advertising slogans, familiar slang and...
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$69.99 USD- $36.54 USD
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Jewish History - The Big PictureAdult readers will appreciate this epic story of the Jewish people rendered as a concise, accessible, and engaging narrative.This lively and accessible volume presents the full range of Jewish history, from biblical to contemporary times. Adapted from the two-volume award-winning work, The History of...
- $39.54 USD
$95.99 USD- $39.54 USD
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Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist): The Language Revolution That Made China ModernPULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy...
- $36.00 USD
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Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New YorkFrom the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planetHalf of all...
- $30.00 USD
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Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to WriteLiterary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection...
- $28.80 USD
$46.99 USD- $28.80 USD
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Meaning of MeaningLanguage is the most important of all the instruments of civilization. This is the premise of a work whose significance to the study of language, literature, and philosophy has remained undiminished since its original publication in 1923. New Introduction by Umberto Eco; Indices.Author: C....
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Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words"A fascinating look at how we talk about women. . . . Dense with information and anecdotes, Mother Tongue touches on the hilarious and the devastating, with ample dashes of an ingredient so painfully absent from most discussions of sex and gender: humor." ―Lisa...
- $40.00 USD
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Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global"The story of how one language left the steppes of Ukraine and became the earth's dominant language family has become clearer and more exciting than ever before. Hooray for a book where the author's curiosity, diligence, and literary craft gets it all down in...
- $47.34 USD
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Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden LanguagesAn enthralling tour of the world's rarest and most endangered languages Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life. Rare Tongues tells the stories of the world's rare and...
- $47.29 USD
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Sea & FogThese interrelated meditations explore the nature of the individual spirit and the individual spiritedness of the natural world. As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, in Sea & Fog, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, and syntactic pleasures at once.Author: Etel AdnanPublisher: Nightboat...
- $21.54 USD
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Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical MarksA charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography. Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (+)--which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early...
- $37.90 USD
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The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European RootsThe American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots traces over 13,000 words, representing nearly 1,350 basic roots, to their origins in Proto-Indo-European, the prehistoric ancestor of English. The dictionary includes an introductory essay by Dr. Calvert Watkins, explaining how it is possible to reconstruct the...
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The Deorhord: An Old English BestiaryAn entertaining tour of Old English words for animals, from the author of The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English Many of the animals we encounter in everyday life, from pets and farm animals to the wild creatures of field and forest, have remained...
- $42.77 USD
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The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World"A fascinating look into the origins of modern man."--Publishers WeeklyA book that solves the mystery of the people who spread the ancient mother tongue that gave us English and the other languages spoken by half of humanity today"Authoritative."--New York Times - "A masterpiece."--Wilson Quarterly...
- $59.90 USD
$107.99 USD- $59.90 USD
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The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution Is Rewriting Their StoryToday the number of native speakers of Indo-European languages across the world is approximated to be over 2.6 billion--about 45 percent of the Earth's population. Yet the idea that an ancient, prehistoric population in one time and place gave rise to a wide variety...
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The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way"Vastly informative and vastly entertaining...A scholarly and fascinating book." --Los Angeles Times With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why...
- $22.78 USD
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The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language"An essay in origins ... as theoretical as Hawking and Gorst in trying to see into the deep past. McWhorter is a clear and witty writer."-- Harper'sIn the first book written for the layperson about the natural history of language, linguistic professor John McWhorter...
- $37.97 USD
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