Showing titles in Linguistics

Soon I felt something alive moving along my leg and up my body to my face, and when I looked down, I saw a very small human being, only 15 centimetres tall . . . I was so surprised that I gave a great shout. ’But that is only the first of many surprises which Gulliver has on his travels. He visits a land of giants and a flying island, meets ghosts from the past and horses which talk. An Oxford Bookworms Library reader for learners of English, adapted from the Jonathan Swift original by Clare West.

Dartmoor. A wild, wet place in the south-west of England. A place where it is easy to get lost, and to fall into the soft green earth which can pull the strongest man down to his death. A man is running for his life. Behind him comes an enormous dog - a dog from his worst dreams, a dog from hell. Between him and a terrible death stands only one person - the greatest detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes.

E. M. Forster’s first novel explores the comic and tragic effects of culture clash between insular, provincial British personalities and sensual Italian culture and atmosphere. Lilia Herriton, an impulsive 33-year-old widow from London, travels to Tuscany, where she falls in love with both Italy and the handsome, carefree Gino Carelli, a dentist’s son 12 years her junior. When news reaches the snobbish Herriton family that Lilia intends to marry again, this time to an unsuitable Italian, the domineering Mrs. Herriton sends her son, Philip, to prevent the catastrophe - but he arrives too late.

Napoleon's presumptuous but unsung hero, the Brigadier Gerard, faces certain death at every turn while outwitting the enemies of France! Gerard careens across Europe, swept along in the ebb and flow of the Napoleonic wars.

Charles Dickens' classic novel of mystery, read by Alex Jennings. A body is found in the River Thames and is identified as John Harmon. He was due to inherit a great fortune on the condition that he marry a young woman called Bella Wilfer. And so the story begins and unravels and we are introduced to the mysterious John Rokesmith, Our Mutual Friend.

Outside the ruins of San Francisco, a former UC Berkeley professor of literature recounts the chilling sequence of events which led to his current lowly state - a gruesome pandemic which killed nearly every living soul on the planet, in a matter of days. Modern civilization tottered and fell, and a new race of barbarians - the western world's brutalized workers - assumed power everywhere. Over the space of a few decades, all learning has been lost.

Hedda Gabler is one of the most interesting and intricate figures to appear on stage. Her boredom with her mariage and jealousy of her former lover set off a chain of events that result in an untimely death. Oh, but the deceased did "die beautifully"!

When a volcano suddenly seems to erupt and threaten a mountain town of North Carolina, Inspector Strock is sent to determine the danger. When an automobile race in Wisconsin is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of a vehicle traveling at many times the top speed of the entrants, Strock is again consulted. And when an odd-shaped boat is sighted moving at impossible speeds off the New England coast, Stock and his boss begin to wonder if the incidents are related.

In the same engaging style and dry humor that makes the Podictionary podcast popular, Hodgson traces the development of our language using easily recognizable milestones such as Beowulf, William the Conqueror, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, with a minimum of dates and dry facts.

Stevenson's brooding historical romance demonstrates his most abiding theme, the elemental struggle between good and evil, as it unfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, amid the fierce loyalties and violent enmities that characterized Scottish history.

"Ciao". Una delle nostre parole più famose nel mondo origina dal veneziano sciavo, nel senso di schiavo, usato per salutare qualcuno ponendosi al suo servizio, come a dire Servo vostro! Si è affermata come saluto confidenziale tra Otto e Novecento, per poi diventare di uso generalizzato in tempi più recenti. È una parola-azione: ciao "si dice" e "si fa". La sua fortuna internazionale passa attraverso il made in ltaly, ma è debitrice anche di episodi particolari connessi a canzoni o film di successo.

C'est en linguiste de terrain que Claude Hagège a abordé le champ des langues. Son intérêt pour leur réalité vécue, leur chair vive et le terreau d'origine de la parole humaine en font un adepte d'une approche empirico-inductive, aboutissant ainsi à des conclusions d'ordre général à partir d'une matière concrète.

Listen to Captain of the Polestar with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. The Captain of the Polestar is a collection of strange mystery tales that are independent of each other, sometimes involving ship voyages, shipwrecks, amnesia, lost love, grand thefts, comedy, and fairy tales.

Listen to Burning Daylight with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. Burning Daylight, Jack London's fictional novel published in 1910, was one of the best-selling books of that year and it was his best-selling book in his lifetime. The novel takes place in the Yukon Territory in 1893. The main character, nicknamed Burning Daylight was the most successful entrepreneur of the Alaskan Gold Rush. The story of the main character was partially based upon the life of Oakland entrepreneur "Borax" Smith.

Listen to At the Earths Core with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. Dr. Abner Perry (Peter Cushing) is an English scientist who has invented a massive drill that can dig deep into the Earth. Joined by his adventure-seeking American backer, David Innes (Doug McClure), Perry accidentally discovers an underground civilization of primitive humans who live in fear of telepathic flying monsters. David becomes intrigued by the beautiful native Dia (Caroline Munro), and must rescue her when she is chosen as a human sacrifice.

A collection of short stories from such favorites as Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling are joined by others written anonymously in this anthology which will have you scratching your head and listening just a bit longer to discover the key to the mysteries.

Splendiferous Speech explores the main sources of the American vernacular - the expanding western frontier, the bumptious world of politics, and the sensation-filled pages of popular 19th-century newspapers. It's a process that started with the earliest English colonists (first word adoption - the Algonquian raccoon) and is still going strong today. Author Rosemarie Ostler takes listeners along on the journey as Americans learn to declare linguistic independence and embrace their own brand of speech.

Insulting the president is an American tradition. From Washington to Trump, presidents have been called "lazy," "feeble," "pusillanimous," and more. Our leaders have been derided as "ignoramuses," "idiots," "morons," and "fatheads," and have been compared to all manner of animals - worms and whales and hyenas, sad jellyfish, strutting crows, lap dogs, reptiles, and monkeys. Political insults tell us what we value in our leaders by showing how we devalue them. In Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels, linguist Edwin Battistella collects over 500 insults aimed at American presidents.

In the ancient country of Orn an old man called the Bee-man spends his life in the company of bees. He lives humbly and contentedly until a Junior Sorcerer happens by with some disturbing news: The Bee-man, he says, has been transformed - he once was someone (or something) entirely different. But who? Or what? A giant or a prince? A dog or a dragon? The now restless Bee-man sets out on a quest to ascertain his original form, telling himself, "When I see it, I shall be drawn toward it."

One of the first psychic vampire novels of its time - where the vampire feeds off of more than just blood - The House of the Vampire is an early classic in its genre. This Victorian novel operates in the continuum of life and death. What has been can be again, though often terribly transformed. Energetically inventive and infused with a relish for the supernatural, especially the trappings of the dark, The House of the Vampire delivers a horror which we know does not - but none the less conceivably might - exist and threaten ourselves.