Showing titles in Linguistics

In a hole under the floorboards Silas Marner the linen-weaver keeps his gold. Every day he works hard at his weaving, and every night he takes the gold out and holds the bright coins lovingly, feeling them and counting them again and again. The villagers are afraid of him and he has no family, no friends. Only the gold is his friend, his delight, his reason for living. But what if a thief should come in the night and take his gold away?

These tales are full of play-on-words and unusual characters that will charm children and grown-ups alike. Come along with us and meet Gold Buskin Wincher, the Potao-Face Blind Man, Rags Habakuk, the Flongboos, Hatrack the Horse, Slipfoot, and many others!

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.

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.

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 humor that has attracted 4.5 million downloads of the Podictionary podcast, Global Wording traces the development of our language using easily recognizable milestones such as Beowulf, William the Conqueror, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Rather than relying on scores of...

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.

Marco Balzano ispirandosi nel titolo al film di Nanni Moretti Palombella Rossa, si interroga sul perché l'etimologia sia una scienza che non riceve la considerazione che merita nonostante eserciti, in chi ci si avvicina, un forte fascino. Attraverso quelli che a tutti gli effetti potremmo definire dieci scavi etimologici, ci dice che ogni parola ha un corpo da rispettare che non può essere stravolto a nostro piacimento. Perché ogni parola ha una sua identità e una sua vita autonoma.

Un recorrido por diversos países de Europa, América y Asia para saber cuál es su verbo clave y a la vez entender más su cultura.

Le idee sbagliate sono sempre pericolose, ma ne esistono due che sembrano resistere nel tempo e, se combinate, costituiscono una miscela deflagrante. Sono la convinzione che esistano lingue migliori di altre, lingue banali e lingue geniali, lingue musicali e lingue stonate, e quella che la realtà si veda in modo diverso secondo la lingua che si parla, come se potesse condizionare i nostri sensi e i nostri ragionamenti. Andrea Moro affronta questi pregiudizi, e ne scopre i limiti, con ogni arma a disposizione: dalla filosofia, alla linguistica, alle neuroscienze.

"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.

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.

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.