Showing results for "life" in Linguistics

Daniel Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977 - with his wife and three young children - intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding. The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property.

This biography describes the intellectual and political milieus that helped shape Noam Chomsky, a pivotal figure in contemporary linguistics, politics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy. It also presents an engaging political history of the last several decades, including such events as the Spanish Civil War, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War.

The last decade has seen an exponential increase in the development and adoption of language technologies, from personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa, through automatic translation, to chatbots like ChatGPT. Yet questions remain about what we stand to lose or gain when we rely on them in our everyday lives. As a non-native English speaker living in an English-speaking country, Vered Shwartz has experienced both amusing and frustrating moments using language technologies: from relying on inaccurate automatic translation, to failing to activate personal assistants with her foreign accent.

In On the Tip of My Tongue, logophile and television star Tom Read Wilson takes a delicious dive into the etymology and usage of words, euphemisms and bon mots. Written with his trademark sparkling wit, the star of Celebs Go Dating and self-avowed word-lover presents a hilarious and fascinating...

A baby is found by wood nymphs in the forest of Burzee. They raise him as their own and give him the name Neclaus. When he grows up, Neclaus has to leave the forest so he makes a home for himself in the laughing valley of Hohaha, where he lives amongst humans for the first time. He discovers there that many children are very poor and neglected so, to cheer them up, he whittles wooden toys as gifts. Eventually he makes presents for all the children and so the story of Santa Claus is born.

Speaking My Soul is the honest story of linguist John R. Rickford's life from his early years as the youngest of ten children in Guyana to his status as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, of the transformation of his identity from colored or mixed race in Guyana to black in the USA, and of his work championing Black Talk and its speakers. In this engaging memoir, Rickford recalls landmark events for his racial identity.

This is the story of Dr. Geneva Smitherman, aka "Dr. G," the pioneering linguist often referred to as the "Queen of Black Language." In a series of narrative essays, Dr. G writes eloquently and powerfully about the role of language in social transformation and the academic, intellectual, linguistic, and societal debates that shaped her groundbreaking work as a Black Studies O.G. and a Womanist scholar-activist of African American Language.

Surprisingly few people take any time to think about how they are learning languages. They usually just trust their teacher or friends' advice. This is inefficient at best and often liable to failure at worst. Language learning and learning in general have been over-complicated by a mass of theories, methods, and techniques. This makes life harder than it needs to be. This book attempts to cut through the noise and give a clear description of how languages are actually learned.

Join Henty's Hero on an adventure in Australia in the early days of its settlement, when the bush-rangers and the natives constituted a real and formidable danger. Reuben, a young English lad, after rather a stormy boyhood, emigrates to Australia, where he gets employment as an officer in the mounted police.

Where do our everyday words come from? The bagel you eat for breakfast, the bumf you have to wade through at the office, and the bus that takes you home again: we use these words without thinking about their origins or how their meanings have changed over time. Simon Horobin takes the listener on a journey through a typical day, showing how the words we use to describe routine activities - getting up, going to work, eating meals - have surprisingly fascinating histories.

This compact but powerful book argues for the primacy of language - of the words we speak - as a force for creating the lives we want to lead. There are ways of speaking that will produce action and change, and there are ways of speaking that don’t. This book explores that distinction. For anyone who is wanting to lead a more intentional, focused, and powerful life, Change Your World One Word at a Time is both inspirational and practical.