We've ranked the best linguistics books using expert recommendations, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.
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1
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
The classic book on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind.
In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.
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Recommended by Lane Greene and Simon Baron-Cohen.
Lane Greene
There are two achievements in this book. One is to smuggle Linguistics 101 into a popular book, which is just fantastic. The other is his own argument about the nature of language, and the title says it all. [source]
Simon Baron-Cohen
It’s a really wonderful example of what you can do: take research into something as fundamental to human nature as language and make it accessible to a wide audience. [source]
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The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
John McWhorter
4.8
There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment.
Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.
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3
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson—the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent—brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.
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4
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
Guy Deutscher
4.8
Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language —and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"?
Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water —a "she"— becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial.
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Recommended by Lane Greene.
Lane Greene
Yes – ish. Deustcher does a great job of first taking on those old notions. He goes back to the romantic 20th century ideas, in particular to a writer called Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf was an amateur linguist, he was largely self-taught but spent a lot of time doing research on this topic. Whorf famously claimed that the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest did not have a concept of time like westerners, because their language lacked those words. It turns out that he was wrong on both counts. His claims were based on interviews with one Hopi Indian in New York. Whorf was just off base and later researchers showed that. [source]
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5
Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson
4.8
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.
In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
I became aware of all the metaphors embedded in the way I speak and, therefore, the way I think about what is and what isn’t possible. [source]
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In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius
Arika Okrent
4.7
Here is the captivating story of humankind’s enduring quest to build a better language—and overcome the curse of Babel. Just about everyone has heard of Esperanto, which was nothing less than one man’s attempt to bring about world peace by means of linguistic solidarity. And every Star Trek fan knows about Klingon. But few people have heard of Babm, Blissymbolics, Loglan (not to be confused with Lojban), and the nearly nine hundred other invented languages that represent the hard work, high hopes, and full-blown delusions of so many misguided souls over the centuries. With intelligence and humor, Arika Okrent has written a truly original and enlightening book for all word freaks, grammar geeks, and plain old language lovers.
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Recommended by Lane Greene.
Lane Greene
I love this book. People have been inventing languages for hundreds of years. Think of Esperanto, or even the Na’vi language in Avatar. People have been doing this for a really long time and the underlying story – which is a funny, sweet, and sad one – is that many people have felt that existing languages were bad for one reason or another. They fall into two camps. Some people feel their natural language is ambiguous, illogical and messy, so have invented languages because they want to order the world, and force people’s thoughts into order. It draws on that thinking that we talked about earlier: people think that if the language is disordered it leads to disordered thinking. And it’s true that language is disordered and ambiguous, and vague. Any human language is that way sometimes. But these people who have tried to create perfect logical languages have failed to get anyone to learn them. They’re almost unlearnable, or extremely difficult. [source]
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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Steven Pinker
4.7
In The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Steven Pinker looks at how the relationship between words and thoughts can help us understand who we are.
Why do so many swear words involve topics like sex, bodily functions or the divine? Why do some children's names thrive while others fall out of favour? Why do we threaten and bribe and seduce in such elaborate, often comical ways? How can a choice of metaphor damn a politician or start a war? And why do we rarely say what we actually mean?
Language, as Steven Pinker shows, is at the heart of our lives, and through the way we use it - whether to inform, persuade, entertain or manipulate - we can glimpse the very essence of what makes us human.
'Awesome' Daily Mail
'Highly entertaining ... funny and thought-provoking' The Times
'Anyone interested in language should read The Stuff of Thought ... moments of genuine revelation and some very good jokes' Mark Haddon, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year
'No one writes about language as clearly as Steven Pinker, and this is his best book yet' David Crystal, Financial Times
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as The New York Times, Time and Slate, and is the author of six books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate.
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Recommended by Dominic Steil, Henry Hitchings, and Melissa Mohr.
Dominic Steil
One of the books that had the biggest impact on . [source]
Melissa Mohr
This is about language more generally, but it has a great chapter on swearing. It’s a really good shorter summary, where he hits all the highlights about swearing and physiology in terms of how it works in the brain and the effects it has on your body. [source]
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Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
Gretchen McCulloch
4.6
A linguistically informed look at how our digital world is transforming the English language.
Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time.
Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.
Because Internet is essential reading for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.
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Recommended by Andy Baio, Erin McKean, Jen Golbeck, and 4 others.
Andy Baio
"Because Internet" is out today! @GretchenAMcC's book is an insightful look at how the internet is changing language, and I love it. Highly recommended! https://t.co/vWVR1fRJyF [source]
Erin McKean
Because Internet is a joyful exploration of the newest creative upswell of English—if you want to understand why you love emoji, share memes, and don't make a sound when lol-ing, you need this book! [source]
Jen Golbeck
This book is really great! Also, it's legit funny that my submitted review used ~*sparkle text*~ in reference to the discussion in the book, and the edited review only has *bold with asterisks* and no ~. I'm sure @GretchenAMcC would have thoughts! https://t.co/kP8CnMkuSX [source]
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Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Nicholas Ostler
4.6
An unusual and authoritative 'natural history of languages' that narrates the ways in which one language has superseded or outlasted another at different times in history. 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 rarely been examined. Empires of the Word is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations - in education, culture and diplomacy - devised by speakers in the Middle East; the uncanny resilience of Chinese throughout twenty centuries of invasions; the progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the struggle that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English.
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Recommended by Henry Hitchings.
Henry Hitchings
It’s a history of all languages – some have called it a macro-history. The ambition of this book is really extraordinary. There have been lots of histories of English, and there are lots of histories of other languages in those languages, but actually to try and write a history of the whole of language is an incredibly audacious thing, and Ostler pulls it off. [source]
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The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention
Guy Deutscher
4.5
Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct, an original inquiry into the development of that most essential-and mysterious-of human creations: Language
Language is mankind's greatest invention-except, of course, that it was never invented." So begins linguist Guy Deutscher's enthralling investigation into the genesis and evolution of language. If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of "man throw spear," how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced degrees of meaning?
Drawing on recent groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication, giving us fresh insight into how language emerges, evolves, and decays. He traces the evolution of linguistic complexity from an early "Me Tarzan" stage to such elaborate single-word constructions as the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ("you are one of those whom we couldn't turn into a town dweller"). Arguing that destruction and creation in language are intimately entwined, Deutscher shows how these processes are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings.
As entertaining as it is erudite, The Unfolding of Language moves nimbly from ancient Babylonian to American idiom, from the central role of metaphor to the staggering triumph of design that is the Semitic verb, to tell the dramatic story and explain the genius behind a uniquely human faculty.
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The Elements of Style
William Jr. Strunk
4.5
You know the authors' names. You recognize the title. You've probably used this book yourself. And now "The Elements of Style"-the most widely read and employed English style manual-is available in a specially bound 50th Anniversary Edition that offers the title's vast audience an opportunity to own a more durable and elegantly bound edition of this time-tested classic. Offering the same content as the Fourth Edition, revised in 1999, the new casebound 50th Anniversary Edition includes a brief overview of the book's illustrious history. Used extensively by individual writers as well as high school and college students of writing, it has conveyed the principles of English style to millions of readers. This new deluxe edition makes the perfect gift for writers of any age and ability level. Fifty Years of Acclaim for "The Elements of Style," by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White "I first read "Elements of Style" during the summer before I went off to Exeter, and I still direct my students at Harvard to their definition about the difference between 'that' and 'which.' It is the Bible for good, clear writing." -- Henry Louis Gates Jr. "For writers of all kinds and sizes the world begins and ends with Strunk and White's "Elements of Style." Only something to actually write about trumps the list of what is required to put words together in some kind of coherent way. I treasure its presence in my life and salute its fifty years of glory and accomplishment." -- Jim Lehrer ""The Elements of Style" remains an unwavering beacon of light in these grammatically troubled times. I would be lost without it." -- Ann Patchett "To the extent I know how to write clearly at all, I probably taught myself while I was teaching others -- seventh graders, in Flint, Michigan, in 1967. I taught them with a copy of Strunk & White lying in full view on my desk, sort of in the way the Gideons leave Bibles in cheap hotel rooms, as a way of saying to the hapless inhabitant: 'In case your reckless ways should strand you here, there's help.' S&W doesn't really teach you how to write, it just tantalizingly reminds you that there's an orderly way to go about it, that clarity's ever your ideal, but -- really -- it's all going to be up to you." -- Richard Ford ""The Elements of Style" never seems to go out of date. Its counsel is sound and funny, wise and unpretentious. And while its precepts are a foundation of direct communication, Strunk and White do not insist on a way of writing beyond clear expression. The rest is up to the imagination, the intelligence within." -- David Remnick, editor of "The New Yorker" "It's the toughness-the irreverence and implicit laughter-that attracted me to the little book when I was seventeen. I fell in love with Strunk & White's loathing for cant and bloviation, the ruthless cutting of crap, jargon, and extra words. For me, that skeptical directness included a tacit permission by "The Elements of Style" to break its rules on occasion: an alloy of generosity in the blade, a grace I still admire and still learn from." -- Robert Pinsky "In the quest for clarity, one can have no better guides than Strunk and White. For me, their book has been invaluable and remains essential." -- Dan Rather "Eschew surplusage! A perfect book." --Jonathan Lethem "Not until I started teaching writing and I reread "The Elements of Style" did I realize that most everything I would be teaching young writers, and everything I would be learning myself as a writer, was contained between the covers of this slim, elegant, wise little book." -- Julia Alvarez "Strunk and White seared their way into my brain long ago, and I benefit from them daily." -- Steven J. Dubner, co-author of "Freakonomics" "Since high school, I have kept a copy of this book handy. That should be unnecessary. I should, by now, have fully internalized "The Elements of Style." But sometimes I get entangled in a paragraph that refuses to be 'clear, brief, bold.' I dip back into "The Elements of Style" and am refreshed. After Scott Simon interviewed me on NPR about whether the word 'e-mail' needs a hyphen (yes, it does), some listeners, including friends of mine, wondered why I had answered in the affirmative when asked, in passing, 'Are you a drunken white man?' Those listeners misheard. 'Strunk and White man' was what Scott said." -- Roy Blount Jr. "Strunk & White--writing's good-natured law firm--still contains enough sparkling good sense to clean up the whole bloviating blogosphere." -- Thomas Mallon "I used Strunk -- that's what we called it, Strunk -- as a student at Berkeley fifty years ago. I didn't know that it was new, and that we were the first generation to be educated in "The Elements of Style." I got a firm foundation in the English language, learned to write basically, and could depict the realistic world. Then I was able to become an impressionist and expressionist." -- Maxine Hong Kingston "Strunk and White's gigantic little book must be the most readable advice on writing ever written. Side by side with Roget, Shakespeare, the Bible, and a dictionary, it's an essential for every writer's shelf." -- X.J. Kennedy" ""With what joy I welcome the fiftieth anniversary of "The Elements of Style." I am greatly indebted to this book for the invaluable help it has given me all these years." -- Horton Foote "Elegant, droll, and perfectly proportioned, and like your favorite aunt, strict but affectionate. And, like your favorite aunt, full of optimism: You can, and will, be a better writer! There has never been a better, briefer, or more loved book about the art and craft of communicating." -- Susan Orlean "This book is an essential tool. It has been of great use to me and is probably responsible for my best writing. I owe my success to Strunk and White; only the mistakes are mine." -- Ben Affleck, in "O, the Oprah Magazine" "This book is a wonderful example of teaching by example. Not only does it recommend clear and concise writing, it demonstrates it. Written in the style of a friend offering help, it is a godsend to anyone wanting to put words on paper. Thank you, Messieurs Strunk and White. And Happy Anniversary, "Elements of Style."" -- S.E. Hinton "When I began to have ... I wouldn't say arguments but conversations in my mind with Strunk and White about a few of their rules and principles, I knew I was coming into my own. If only they were still here to talk things over! No doubt their side of the exchange would be kindly put, well-informed, and wise. They'd probably help me with my side of it. What more could one want from writers reaching out to help other writers?" -- Barbara Wallraff, language columnist for "The Atlantic" "I don't believe there is a serious writer alive who doesn't have a worn copy of 'Strunk & White'on his or her bookshelf." -- Mignon Fogarty, author of "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips ""for Better Writing" "This little book has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to write better -- partly by precept and partly by example. It continues to influence more writers than any other. It's a force for good in the world." -- Bryan A. Garner, author of "Garner's Modern American Usage" "I can think of no better guide to good writing, and I always think of this little classic with a warm heart. More importantly, I revisit its pages often. It's the one essential book on writing." -- Jay Parini, author of "Why Poetry Matters" "Clarity and simplicity have always been the goals, and this book shows the way. It has always been a lighthouse in the dark and stormy night of student prose, of all of our prose." -- Ron Carlson "The only rules you are ever going to get from me are all in Strunk and White." --Ursula K. Le Guin, from "Steering the Craft " "["The Elements of Style "is] a book to which I return from time to time, the way I periodically reread Shakespeare. I always discover something new, settle a question that has been puzzling me, or learn a principle of usage that I have been pretending to know, a pretense that has resulted in inconsistency and in the sort of errors from which I can only pray some saintly copy editor will save me." -- Francine Prose, from "Reading"" Like A Writer" ..".still a little book, small enough and important enough to carry in your pocket, as I carry mine." -- Charles Osgood "Almost every writer has a Strunk and White story. One journalism professor spends the first two weeks of school forcing his students to memorize the book. A top editor at a major paper buys copies at yard sales to distribute to her writers and interns. It has even caused love affairs. . . . Could its greatness be any more clear?" -- Jesse Sheidlower, American Editor of the "Oxford"" English Dictionary," on NPR" ""If the English language is one of the finest homes ever devised for the human spirit, "Elements" is the best guided house tour we've got." --David Gelernter, "The Wall Street Journal" ..".Should be the daily companion of anyone who writes for a living and, for that matter, anyone who writes at all." "--"Jonathan Yardley, " Greensboro (N.C.) Daily News" "No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume." -- Herbert A. Kenny, "The Boston Globe" "Buy it, study it, enjoy it. It's as timeless as a book can be in our age of volubility." -- Charles Poore, "The New York Times" "White is one of the best stylists and most lucid minds in this country. What he says and his way of saying it are equally rewarding." "-- "Edmund Fuller, "The Wall Street Journal ""If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of "The Elements of Style." The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy." -- Dorothy Parker, "Esquire"
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Recommended by Tobi Lütke, Alina Varlanuta, Ann Handley, and 3 others.
Tobi Lütke
Founder & CEO/Shopify
My most frequently gifted book is this book because I like good writing. [source]
Alina Varlanuta
My professional path – copywriting – somehow intertwines with my unprofessional (hahaha) path – writing so I would recommend reading literature for both. Somehow reading and writing are two ways of doing the same thing: storytelling (even when you read you tell yourself a story in your own voice, bringing your personal emotion and empathy to the story you’re reading). The only difference is that when I’m reading, panic is far away from me, in a safe place. Nevertheless, the words below helped me rewrite and think twice before adding an exclamation point: The Elements of Style. [source]
Bill Nye
This is my guide. I accept that I’ll never write anything as good as the introductory essay by the author. It’s brilliant. [source]
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12
Course in General Linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure, Roy Harris
4.5
The Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from students' notes after Saussure's death in 1913, founded modern linguistic theory by breaking the study of language free from a merely historical and comparativist approach. Saussure's new method, now known as Structuralism, has since been applied to such diverse areas as art, architecture, folklore, literary criticism, and philosophy.
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The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
Mark Forsyt
4.5
The Etymologicon springs from Mark Forsyth's Inky Fool blog on the strange connections between words. It's an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language, taking in monks and monkeys, film buffs and buffaloes, and explaining precisely what the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening.
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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English
John McWhorter
4.5
A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar
Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.
Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century ad, John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor. Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English--and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for (and no, it's not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition).
As Sam Walton himself said, this is "...a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. And it's a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don't, and about sticking to your guns." It's the story of how Walton parlayed a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king of the late twentieth century, he never lost the common touch. Here Walton tells his extraordinary story in his own inimitable words. Genuinely modest, but always sure of his ambitions and achievements, Walton shares his thinking in a candid, straight-from-the-shoulder style.
"Here is an extraordinary success story about a man whose empire was built not with smoke and mirrors, but with good old-fashioned elbow grease." (Detroit Free Press)
Expounds on the principles of discount retailing and discusses his core values of frugality and a bias for action—a willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes. Bezos included both in Amazon’s corporate values. [source]
Rob "Crypto Bobby" Paone
@tmac604 Read it earlier this summer, a great book 👍 and also hilarious to compare to current corporate excess ala WeWork [source]
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The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester
4.4
The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.
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Recommended by Peter Gilliver.
Peter Gilliver
W.C. Minor was a member of the public, but he just happened to be a murderer who was banged up in Broadmoor. [source]
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17
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Lynne Truss
4.4
In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss, gravely concerned about our current grammatical state, boldly defends proper punctuation. She proclaims, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. Using examples from literature, history, neighborhood signage, and her own imagination, Truss shows how meaning is shaped by commas and apostrophes, and the hilarious consequences of punctuation gone awry.
Featuring a foreword by Frank McCourt, and interspersed with a lively history of punctuation from the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, Eats, Shoots & Leaves makes a powerful case for the preservation of proper punctuation.
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18
Syntactic Structures
Noam Chomsky
4.4
Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.
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An Introduction to Language
Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams
4.4
An Introduction to Language is ideal for use at all levels and in many different areas of instruction including education, languages, psychology, anthropology, teaching English as a Second Language (TESL), and linguistics. All chapters in this best-seller have been substantially revised to reflect recent discoveries and new understanding of linguistics and languages.
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20
Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
Gabriel Wyner
4.4
The ultimate rapid language-learning guide! For those who’ve despaired of ever learning a foreign language, here, finally, is a book that will make the words stick.At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school -- who does? -- rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources. In Fluent Forever Wyner reveals what he’s discovered. The greatest challenge to learning a foreign language is the challenge of memory; there are just too many words and too many rules. For every new word we learn, we seem to forget two old ones, and as a result, fluency can seem out of reach. Fluent Forever tackles this challenge head-on. With empathy for the language-challenged and abundant humor, Wyner deconstructs the learning process, revealing how to build a foreign language in your mind from the ground up.
Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You'll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you'll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery, rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you'll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. Soon, you'll gain the ability to learn grammar and more difficult abstract words--without the tedious drills and exercises of language classes and grammar books.
This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.
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How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die
David Crystal
4.3
In this fascinating survey of everything from how sounds become speech to how names work, David Crystal answers every question you might ever have had about the nuts and bolts of language in his usual highly illuminating way. Along the way, we find out about eyebrow flashes, whistling languages, how parents teach their children to speak, how politeness travels across languages and how the way we talk show not just how old we are but where we're from and even who we want to be.
Whether looking at the whistle languages of the Canary Islands or describing the layout of the human throat, this landmark book will enrich the lives of everyone who reads it.
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The Stories of English
David Crystal
4.3
The English language is now accepted as the global lingua franca of the modern age, spoken or written in by over a quarter of the human race. But how did it evolve? How did a language spoken originally by a few thousand Anglo-Saxons become one used by more than 1,500 million? What developments can be seen as we move from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day? A host of fascinating questions are answered in The Stories of English, a groundbreaking history of the language by David Crystal.
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Recommended by Nicholas Ostler.
Nicholas Ostler
David Crystal is a friend of mine. Conveniently he has said in print that English may find itself in the service of mankind forever. When I challenged him he said: “I only said it may”, suggesting that he also thinks it may not. From my attempt to show that the world’s linguistic future may be very diverse, he’s a useful straw man to attack. But he’s an extremely estimable linguist and knows he can’t know the future any more than I can. [source]
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23
Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
Steven Pinker
4.3
In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker explains the mysteries of language by examining a single construction from a dozen viewpoints, proposing that the essence of language is a mental dictionary of memorized words, and a mental grammar of creative rules.
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24
The Study of Language
George Yule
4.3
Designed for beginners, this best-selling textbook provides a thorough introduction to the study of language. It introduces the analysis of the key elements of language--sounds, words, structures and meanings, and provides a solid foundation in all of the essential topics. The third edition has been extensively revised to include new sections on important contemporary issues in language study, including language and culture, African American English, sign language, and slang. A comprehensive glossary provides useful explanations of technical terms, and each chapter contains a range of new study questions and research tasks, with suggested answers.
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25
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
Daniel Leonard Everett
4.3
A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil.
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. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live–so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them.
Over three decades, Everett spent a total of seven years among the Pirahã, and his account of this lasting sojourn is an engrossing exploration of language that questions modern linguistic theory. It is also an anthropological investigation, an adventure story, and a riveting memoir of a life profoundly affected by exposure to a different culture. Written with extraordinary acuity, sensitivity, and openness, it is fascinating from first to last, rich with unparalleled insight into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.
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26
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Steven Pinker
4.3
A short and entertaining book on the modern art of writing well by New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?
In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.
In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish.
Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.
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Recommended by Ellen Lupton and 1 others.
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27
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
George Lakoff
4.3
"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist
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28
On Language
Noam Chomsky, Mitsou Ronat
4.3
Two of Chomsky's most famous and accessible works available in an affordable and attractive edition.
Described by the New York Times as "arguably the most important intellectual alive," Noam Chomsky is known throughout the world for his highly influential writings on language and politics. Featuring two of Chomsky's most popular and enduring books in one omnibus volume, On Language contains some of the noted linguist and political critic's most informal and accessible work to date, making it an ideal introduction to his thought.
In Part I, Language and Responsibility (1979), Chomsky presents a fascinating self-portrait of his political, moral, and linguistic thinking through a series of interviews with Mitsou Ronat, the noted French linguist. In Part II, Reflections on Language (1975), Chomsky explores the more general implications of the study of language and offers incisive analyses of the controversies among psychologists, philosophers, and linguists over fundamental questions of language.
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29
The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building
David J. Peterson
4.3
An insider’s tour through the construction of invented languages from the bestselling author and creator of languages for the HBO series Game of Thrones and the Syfy series Defiance
From master language creator David J. Peterson comes a creative guide to language construction for sci-fi and fantasy fans, writers, game creators, and language lovers. Peterson offers a captivating overview of language creation, covering its history from Tolkien’s creations and Klingon to today’s thriving global community of conlangers. He provides the essential tools necessary for inventing and evolving new languages, using examples from a variety of languages including his own creations, punctuated with references to everything from Star Wars to Michael Jackson. Along the way, behind-the-scenes stories lift the curtain on how he built languages like Dothraki for HBO’s Game of Thrones and Shiväisith for Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World, and an included phrasebook will start fans speaking Peterson’s constructed languages. The Art of Language Invention is an inside look at a fascinating culture and an engaging entry into a flourishing art form—and it might be the most fun you’ll ever have with linguistics.
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30
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
Kory Stamper
4.3
Brimming with intelligence and personality, a vastly entertaining account of how dictionaries are made a must read for word mavens.
While most of us might take dictionaries for granted, the process of writing them is in fact as lively and dynamic as language itself. With sharp wit and irreverence, Kory Stamper cracks open the complex, obsessive world of lexicography--from the agonizing decisions about what and how to define, to the knotty questions of usage in an ever-changing language. She explains why small words are the most difficult to define (have you ever tried to define is ?), how it can take nine months to define a single word, and how our biases about language and pronunciation can have tremendous social influence. Throughout, Stamper brings to life the hallowed halls (and highly idiosyncratic cubicles) of Merriam-Webster, a world inhabited by quirky, erudite individuals who quietly shape the way we communicate. A sure delight for all lovers of words, Word by Word might also quietly improve readers grasp and use of the English language."
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31
Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe
Gaston Dorre
4.3
Welcome to Europe as you've never known it before, seen through the peculiarities of its languages and dialects. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Gaston Dorren takes us on an intriguing tour of the continent, from Proto-Indo-European (the common ancestor of most European languages) to the rise and rise of English, via the complexities of Welsh plurals and Czech pronunciation. Along the way we learn why Esperanto will never catch on, how the language of William the Conqueror lives on in the Channel Islands and why Finnish is the easiest European language.
Surprising, witty and full of extraordinary facts, this book will change the way you think about the languages around you. Polyglot Gaston Dorren might even persuade you that English is like Chinese.
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32
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
David W. Anthony
4.3
Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.
Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.
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33
Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States
Bill Bryson
4.3
In Made in America, Bill Bryson de-mythologizes his native land, explaining how a dusty hamlet with neither woods nor holly became Hollywood; how the Wild West wasn't won; why Americans say "lootenant" and "Toosday"; and exactly why Mr. Yankee Doodle called his feathered cap "Macaroni."
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34
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas R. Hofstadter
4.3
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.
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Recommended by Steve Jurvetson, Seth Godin, Cory Zue, and 2 others.
Steve Jurvetson
Steve Jurvetson recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show". [source]
In the last week, I discovered that at least two of my smart friends hadn't read Godel, Escher, Bach. They have now. You should too. [source]
Cory Zue
More recently books like Godel, Escher, Bach and Sapiens have influenced my thinking a lot. [source]
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35
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
David Bellos
4.2
Funny and surprising on every page, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means—whether we wish to understand Astérix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron's Avatar.
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world. In the words of Bellos: "The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition."
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36
Historical Linguistics
Lyle Campbell
4.2
Containing abundant examples and problem sets, this book provides an accessible, hands-on, how-to introduction to historical linguistics, one of the most popular undergraduate linguistic areas.
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37
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
Margalit Fox
4.2
In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery. Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean--the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen--to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the decipherment; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.
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38
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
David Crystal
4.2
This Second Edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language presents a mass of new information and introduces the subject of language to a fresh generation of students and general readers. Probably the most successful general study of language ever published, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language covers all the major themes of language study, including popular ideas about language, language and identity, the structure of language, speaking and listening, writing, reading, and signing, language acquisition, the neurological basis of language, and languages of the world. Exposing this work to a new generation of readers, the Second Edition extends the range of coverage to include advances in areas such as machine translation, speech interaction with machines, and language teaching. There is new material on acoustics, physiological concepts of language, and World English, and a complete update of the language distribution maps, language-speaking statistics, table of the world's languages, and further reading. All geopolitical material has been revised to take account of boundary changes. The book has been redesigned and is presented for the first time in full color, with new pictures and maps added.
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39
The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language
John H. McWhorter
4.2
Japanese has a term that covers both green and blue. Russian has separate terms for dark and light blue. Does this mean that Russians perceive these colors differently from Japanese people? Does language control and limit the way we think, such that each language gives its speakers a different "worldview"?
This short, opinionated book addresses the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that the language we speak shapes the way we perceive the world. Linguist John McWhorter argues that while this idea is mesmerizing, it is plainly wrong. Cultural differences are quite real. However, the way languages' grammar world, and the random ways that their vocabularies happen to describe the world—whether time is expresses with vertical expressions instead of horizontal ones, whether a language happens to have a word for stick out or wipe—do not correspond to its speakers' experience of living. The fact that a language has only one word for eat, drink and smoke—as many do— doesn't mean its speakers don't process the differences between food and beverages as vividly as other people, and those who use the same word for blue and green perceive those two colors just as vividly as others do.
McWhorter shows not only how the idea of language as a lens fails but also why we want so badly to believe it: we're eager to celebrate diversity by acknowledging the intelligence of peoples who may not think like we do. Though well-intentioned, our belief in this idea poses an obstacle to a better understanding of human nature and even trivializes the people we seek to celebrate. The reality—that all humans think alike—provides another, better way for us to acknowledge the intelligence of all peoples.
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40
Language and Mind
Noam Chomsky
4.2
This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind, first published in 2006. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system (Universal Grammar), through the rules and principles of which we acquire an internalized knowledge (I-language). Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the 'biolinguistic' approach that has guided Chomsky's work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind.
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41
The Story of English
Robert McCrum, Robert Macneil, William Cran
4.2
Now revised, The Story of English is the first book to tell the whole story of the English language. Originally paired with a major PBS miniseries, this book presents a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English—from its Anglo-Saxon origins some two thousand years ago to the present day, when English is the dominant language of commerce and culture with more than one billion English speakers around the world. From Cockney, Scouse, and Scots to Gulla, Singlish, Franglais, and the latest African American slang, this sweeping history of the English language is the essential introduction for anyone who wants to know more about our common tongue.
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42
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
Christine Kenneally
4.2
Recommended by Lane Greene.
Lane Greene
This is a book about words and language and evolution. Christine Kenneally, the author, starts off by describing how, surprisingly enough, this subject was completely ignored by linguistics for a really long time. One of the big official international linguistic bodies in the late 19th century banned all study of the topic, saying that it was unknowable. Even when most intellectuals accepted evolution was a fact, they figured it was too hard to figure out whether language itself had evolved. Then she tells the 20th century story of how Noam Chomsky basically sighed and shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Not interesting, can’t know it,’ and didn’t want to get into it for a very long time. Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist, came to see it as a ‘spandrel’ of some other structural change, basically a by-product of evolution – something that was adapted for another purpose, but repurposed for language. [source]
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43
The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages
Frederick Bodmer, Lancelot Thomas Hogben
4.2
It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages—Teutonic, Romance, Greek—helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a languages as it is actually used in everyday life.
But this book is more than a guide to foreign languages; it goes deep into the roots of all knowledge as it explores the history of speech. It lights up the dim pathways of prehistory and unfolds the story of the slow growth of human expression from the most primitive signs and sounds to the elaborate variations of the highest cultures. Without language no knowledge would be possible; here we see how language is at once the source and the reservoir of all we know.
Eric Weinstein recommended this book on Twitter. [source]
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44
Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)
John McWhorter
4.2
A bestselling linguist takes us on a lively tour of how the English language is evolving before our eyes -- and why we should embrace this transformation and not fight it
Language is always changing -- but we tend not to like it. We understand that new words must be created for new things, but the way English is spoken today rubs many of us the wrong way. Whether it’s the use of literally to mean “figuratively” rather than “by the letter,” or the way young people use LOL and like, or business jargon like What’s the ask? -- it often seems as if the language is deteriorating before our eyes.
But the truth is different and a lot less scary, as John McWhorter shows in this delightful and eye-opening exploration of how English has always been in motion and continues to evolve today. Drawing examples from everyday life and employing a generous helping of humor, he shows that these shifts are a natural process common to all languages, and that we should embrace and appreciate these changes, not condemn them.
Words on the Move opens our eyes to the surprising backstories to the words and expressions we use every day. Did you know that silly once meant “blessed”? Or that ought was the original past tense of owe? Or that the suffix -ly in adverbs is actually a remnant of the word like? And have you ever wondered why some people from New Orleans sound as if they come from Brooklyn?
McWhorter encourages us to marvel at the dynamism and resilience of the English language, and his book offers a lively journey through which we discover that words are ever on the move and our lives are all the richer for it.
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45
The Story of Human Language
John McWhorter
4.2
"I never met a person who is not interested in language," wrote the bestselling author and psychologist Steven Pinker. There are good reasons that language fascinates us so. It not only defines humans as a species, placing us head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators, but it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries. For example:
• How did different languages come to be? • Why isn’t there just a single language? • How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth? • How does a language become extinct?
Dr. John McWhorter, one of America’s leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today.
An accomplished scholar, Professor McWhorter is also a skilled popularizer, whose book The Power of Babel was called "startling, provocative, and remarkably entertaining," by the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The London Times called him "a born teacher." And Steven Pinker, best known as the author of The Language Instinct, offered this praise for the book: "McWhorter’s arguments are sharply reasoned, refreshingly honest, and thoroughly original."
Course Lecture Titles 1. What Is Language? 2. When Language Began 3. How Language Changes—Sound Change 4. How Language Changes—Building New Material 5. How Language Changes—Meaning and Order 6. How Language Changes—Many Directions 7. How Language Changes—Modern English 8. Language Families—Indo-European 9. Language Families—Tracing Indo-European 10. Language Families—Diversity of Structures 11. Language Families—Clues to the Past 12. The Case Against the World’s First Language 13. The Case For the World’s First Language 14. Dialects—Subspecies of Species 15. Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line? 16. Dialects—Two Tongues in One Mouth 17. Dialects—The Standard as Token of the Past 18. Dialects—Spoken Style, Written Style 19. Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar 20. Language Mixture—Words 21. Language Mixture—Grammar 22. Language Mixture—Language Areas 23. Language Develops Beyond the Call of Duty 24. Language Interrupted 25. A New Perspective on the Story of English 26. Does Culture Drive Language Change? 27. Language Starts Over—Pidgins 28. Language Starts Over—Creoles I 29. Language Starts Over—Creoles II 30. Language Starts Over—Signs of the New 31. Language Starts Over—The Creole Continuum 32. What Is Black English? 33. Language Death—The Problem 34. Language Death—Prognosis 35. Artificial Languages 36. Finale—Master Class
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46
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
Melvyn Bragg
4.2
English is understood by around two thousand million people across the world. Yet it was very nearly wiped out in its early years. Melvyn Bragg explores the story of the English language - from its beginnings as a minor Germanic dialect to its position today as a truly established global language.
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47
The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
Mark Forsyth
4.2
The idiosyncratic, erudite and brilliantly funny new book from Mark Forsyth, bestselling author of The Etymologicon and The Horologicon.
In an age unhealthily obsessed with substance, this is a book on the importance of pure style.
From classic poetry to pop lyrics and from the King James Bible to advertising slogans, Mark Forsyth explains the secrets that make a phrase - such as ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’ or ‘To be or not to be’ - memorable.
In his inimitably entertaining and witty style he takes apart famous lines and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming for literary immortality or just an unforgettable one-liner, The Elements of Eloquence proves that you don't need to have anything to say - you simply need to say it well.
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Recommended by Bill Liao.
Bill Liao
The human world occurs in language so best get good at it! [source]
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48
The Story of English in 100 Words
David Crystal
4.2
The world's foremost expert on the English language takes us on an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the history of our vernacular through the ages.
In this entertaining history of the world's most ubiquitous language, David Crystal draws on one hundred words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular since the first definitively English word — ‘roe’ — was written down on the femur of a roe deer in the fifth century.
Featuring ancient words ('loaf'), cutting edge terms that reflect our world ('twittersphere'), indispensable words that shape our tongue ('and', 'what'), fanciful words ('fopdoodle') and even obscene expressions (the "c word"...), David Crystal takes readers on a tour of the winding byways of our language via the rude, the obscure and the downright surprising.
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49
Introducing Linguistics: A Graphic Guide
R.L. Trask and Bill Mayblin
4.2
A brilliantly accessible guide to our most defining faculty as humans: language. Linguistics: A Graphic Guide combines iconic text and images to take us into the fascinating story told by our words. It covers the history of the field from its ancient origins to the most significant and recent advances. It also includes the work of the towering American linguists, such as Chomsky, who were at the centre of the incredible modern blossoming of linguistics.
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50
How to Do Things with Words
J. L. Austin, J. O. Urmson, Marina Sbisà
4.1
John L. Austin was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. The William James Lectures presented Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts on a wide variety of philosophical problems. These talks became the classic How to Do Things with Words.
For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary. Students will find the new text clearer, and, at the same time, more faithful to the actual lectures. An appendix contains literal transcriptions of a number of marginal notes made by Austin but not included in the text. Comparison of the text with these annotations provides new dimensions to the study of Austin's work.
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Recommended by Stephen Breyer.
Stephen Breyer
JL Austin was an ordinary language philosopher. When I studied in Oxford, I went to one of his classes and I read his books. How to Do Things with Words teaches us a lot about how ordinary language works. It is useful to me as a judge, because it helps me avoid the traps that linguistic imprecision can set. If I had to pick a single thing that I draw from Austin’s work it would be that context matters. It enables us to understand, when someone makes a statement, what that statement refers to and what that person meant. Austin set a famous exam question: you bet that all swans are white or black, but does this refer to possible swans on Mars? Not clear. The question is: what’s the context? What’s the scope of that bet? [source]
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51
Comparative Grammar of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French: Learn & Compare 4 Languages Simultaneously
Mikhail Petrunin
4.1
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52
The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park
Jack Lynch
4.1
For language buffs and lexicographers, copy editors and proofreaders, and anyone who appreciates the connection between language and culture—the illuminating story of “proper English.”
In its long history, the English language has had many lawmakers—those who have tried to regulate, or otherwise organize, the way we speak. The Lexicographer’s Dilemma offers the first narrative history of these endeavors, showing clearly that what we now regard as the only “correct” way to speak emerged out of specific historical and social conditions over the course of centuries.
As literary historian Jack Lynch has discovered, every rule has a human history, and the characters peopling his narrative are as interesting for their obsession as for their erudition. The struggle between prescriptivists, who prescribe a correct approach, and descriptivists, who analyze how language works, is at the heart of Lynch’s story. From the sharp-tongued satirist Jonathan Swift, who called for a governmentsponsored academy to issue rulings on the language, and the polymath Samuel Johnson, who put dictionaries on a new footing, to John Horne Tooke, the crackpot linguist whose bizarre theories continue to baffle scholars; Joseph Priestley, whose political radicalism prompted riots; and the ever-crotchety Noah Webster, whose goal was to Americanize the English language—Lynch brings to life a varied cast as illuminating as it is entertaining.
Grammatical “rules” or “laws” are not like the law of gravity, or laws against theft or murder—they’re more like rules of etiquette, made by fallible people and subject to change. Charting the evolution of English, Jack Lynch puts today’s debates—whether about Ebonics in the schools or split infinitives in the New York Times—in a rich historical context, and makes us appreciate anew the hard-won standards we now enjoy.
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53
The Atoms Of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules Of Grammar
Mark C. Baker
4.1
Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it implies a fundamental commonality--and thus mutual intelligibility--of human thought.We are now on the verge of solving this problem. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers have found that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of these rules and how they may vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of the Periodic Table of the Elements: a single framework by which we can understand the fundamental structure of all human language. This is a landmark breakthrough both within linguistics, which will herewith finally become a full-fledged science, and in our understanding of the human mind.
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Language Myths
Laurie Bauer, Peter Trudgill
4.1
The media are ruining English"; "Some languages are harder than others"; "Children can't speak or write properly anymore." Such pieces of "cultural wisdom" are often expressed in newspapers and on radio and television. Rarely is there a response from experts in the fields of language and language development. In this book Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill have invited nineteen respected linguists from all over the world to address these "language myths"--showing that they vary from the misconceived to the downright wrong. With essays ranging from "Women Talk Too Much" and "In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare" to "Italian Is Beautiful, German Is Ugly" and "They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City," Language Myths is a collection that is wide-ranging, entertaining, and authoritative.
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Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang
4.1
Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992. Story for story, he is the most honored young writer in modern SF.
Now, collected here for the first time are all seven of this extraordinary writer's stories so far-plus an eighth story written especially for this volume.
What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven-and broke through to Heaven's other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were arbitrary and inconsistent? What if there were a science of naming things that calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? What if all the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity were literally true, and the sight of sinners being swallowed into fiery pits were a routine event on city streets? These are the kinds of outrageous questions posed by the stories of Ted Chiang. Stories of your life . . . and others.
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Recommended by Naval Ravikant, Meltem Demirors, and Ryan Len.
I’m rereading Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. It’s one of my favorite sci-fi novels. [source]
Meltem Demirors
finally reading Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and i have basically been crying since i opened my kindle such a beautiful writer and such profound topics. division by zero was my favorite of the collection, but the story the book is titled after is stunning 😍 https://t.co/2c5SuDEfkh [source]
Ryan Len
One of the best sci-fi books I’ve read in my life! [source]
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The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Jean Aitchison
4.1
Requiring no prior knowledge of the subject, this text tackles basic questions central to the study of psycholinguistics, such as whether language is restricted to humans, whether there is biological evidence for innate language activity, how children learn language, and how we understand, plan and produce language. The author investigates these issues with regard to animal communication, child language and the language of adults, and provides references and suggestions for further reading.;The book has been substantially revised, in particular taking account of the considerable changes in Chomsky's recent ideas. As a result, the chapters on grammatical innateness, child language acquisition and speech comprehension have been largely rewritten.
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Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World
Ella Frances Sanders
4.1
An artistic collection of more than 50 drawings featuring unique, funny, and poignant foreign words that have no direct translation into English.
Did you know that the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there’s a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? Lost in Translation brings to life more than fifty words that don’t have direct English translations with charming illustrations of their tender, poignant, and humorous definitions. Often these words provide insight into the cultures they come from, such as the Brazilian Portuguese word for running your fingers through a lover’s hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears by a story, or the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee.
In this clever and beautifully rendered exploration of the subtleties of communication, you’ll find new ways to express yourself while getting lost in the artistry of imperfect translation.
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein
4.1
Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his life. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme brilliance, it captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. For Wittgenstein, logic was something we use to conquer a reality which is in itself both elusive and unobtainable. He famously summarized the book in the following words: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.' David Pears and Brian McGuinness received the highest praise for their meticulous translation. The work is prefaced by Bertrand Russell's original introduction to the first English edition.
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Recommended by Reid Hoffman, Sonia Micu, and Tom Stoneham.
Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he's taught a course at Oxford. "One of the bedrocks of modern analytics philosophy is to think of language ... if you're trying to talk to someone else about some problem, and you're trying to make progress, how do you make language as positive an instrument as possible? What are the ways that language can work, and what are the way that language doesn't work?". [source]
Sonia Micu
The book I read many times already is Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Don’t say it’s pretentious. It is beautiful. Some even say it’s poetry. I am far from understanding his complicated genius, but I think I’ve learned how to read it and I think I’ll never stop going back to it. [source]
Tom Stoneham
Wittgenstein’s book is about how we understand the thinkable and the unthinkable, which is a traditional philosophical problem. [source]
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59
Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages
Mark Abley
4.1
In Spoken Here, Mark Abley takes us on a world tour from the Arctic Circle to Oklahoma to Australia in a fervent quest to document some of the world's most endangered languages. His mission is urgent: Of the six thousand languages spoken in the world today, only six hundred may survive into the next century. Abley visits the exotic and frequently remote locales that are home to fading languages and constructs engaging and entertaining portraits of some of the last living speakers of these tongues. Throughout this exhilarating travelogue, he points out that the same forces that put biological species at risk -- development, globalization, loss of habitat -- are also threatening human languages, and with them, something very basic about their speakers' cultures.
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60
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
David Crystal
4.1
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language is one of the publishing phenomena of recent times. Rarely has a book so packed with accurate and well researched factual information been so widely read and popularly acclaimed. It has played a key role in the spread of general interest in language matters, generating further publications and broadcasting events for an avid audience. Its First Edition appeared in hardback in 1995 and a revised paperback in 1997. There have been numerous subsequent updated reprintings; but this Second Edition now presents an overhaul of the subject for a new generation of language-lovers and of teachers, students and professional English-users concerned with their own linguistic legacy.
The book offers a unique experience of the English language, exploring its past, present and future. David Crystal systematically explains the history, structure, variety and range of uses of English worldwide, employing a rich apparatus of text, pictures, tables, maps and graphics.
The length of the Second Edition has increased by 16 pages and there are 44 new illustrations, a new chapter, extensive new material on world English and Internet English, and a complete updating of statistics, further reading suggestions and other references throughout the book.
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61
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
4.1
“In a work of outstanding clarity and sheer brilliance Steven Pinker banishes forever fears that a biological understanding of human nature threatens humane values.” —Helena Cronin, author of The Ant and The Peacock
“A mind blowing, mind openingexpos. Pinker's profoundly positive arguments for the compatibility of biology and humanism are unrivalled for their scope and depth and should be mandatory, if disquieting, reading.” —Patricia Goldman-Rakic, past president of the Society for Neuroscience
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.
Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history.
Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts.
Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small.
An argument against the old view that there is no such thing as human nature, that we’re all culturally determined. He brings together a ton of evidence that that’s wrong. [source]
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62
The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain
Terrence W. Deacon
4.1
This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.
Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.
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63
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Maryanne Wolf
4.1
The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read? As world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading Maryanne Wolf explains in this impassioned book, we taught our brain to read only a few thousand years ago, and in the process changed the intellectual evolution of our species.
Wolf tells us that the brain that examined tiny clay tablets in the cuneiform script of the Sumerians is configured differently from the brain that reads alphabets or of one literate in today's technology.
There are critical implications to such an evolving brain. Just as writing reduced the need for memory, the proliferation of information and the particular requirements of digital culture may short-circuit some of written language's unique contributions—with potentially profound consequences for our future.
Turning her attention to the development of the individual reading brain, Wolf draws on her expertise in dyslexia to investigate what happens when the brain finds it difficult to read. Interweaving her vast knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, literature, and linguistics, Wolf takes the reader from the brains of a pre-literate Homer to a literacy-ambivalent Plato, from an infant listening to Goodnight Moon to an expert reader of Proust, and finally to an often misunderstood child with dyslexia whose gifts may be as real as the challenges he or she faces.
As we come to appreciate how the evolution and development of reading have changed the very arrangement of our brain and our intellectual life, we begin to realize with ever greater comprehension that we truly are what we read. Ambitious, provocative, and rich with examples, Proust and the Squid celebrates reading, one of the single most remarkable inventions in history. Once embarked on this magnificent story of the reading brain, you will never again take for granted your ability to absorb the written word.
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Recommended by Peg Tyre.
Peg Tyre
Read this and you will never again hand your iPhone to your child in the stroller. You will start talking to them and pointing out colours. [source]
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64
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts
Andrew Robinson
4.1
""Andrew Robinson has now followed up his beautifully illustrated The Story of Writing "with a highly appropriate sequel--Lost Languages, "on undeciphered scripts. Many, it seems likely, will never be deciphered ..."--Sir Arthur C. Clarke, C.B.E.A landmark study of the world's most important undeciphered writing systems and the current race to crack them
Maybe it's the tantalizing possibility of giving new voice to long-hushed peoples and civilizations. Perhaps it's the puzzle solver's delight in the mental challenges posed by breaking their codes. Whatever the reasons, the public has long been fascinated with undeciphered ancient scripts and the ongoing efforts to crack them. In "Lost Languages, Andrew Robinson reports from the front lines of the global efforts now under way to crack the Meroitic hieroglyphs of ancient Nubia, the Etruscan alphabet, the Indus Valley Sealstones, the Zapotec script--the earliest in the Americas--and five other major "lost languages." An enthralling story of genius, passion, and competition, "Lost Languages provides a revealing look at how decipherment is done. In what is truly an archaeological mystery book, the author examines each script in detail and reviews what is known about the people who created it, while weaving in the intriguing cast of characters currently competing for the glory of cracking these ancient codes.
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65
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Noam Chomsky
4.1
Beginning in the middle '50s & emanating largely from MIT, an approach was developed to linguistic theory & to the study of the structure of particular languages that diverges in many respects from modern linguistics. Altho this approach is connected to the traditional study of language, it differs enough in its general objectives & in specific conclusions about the sturcutre of language to warrant a name, "transformational generative grammar". Preface Methodological preliminaries Categories & relations in syntactic theory Deep structures & grammatical transformations Some residual problems Notes Bibliography Index
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66
A Little Book of Language
David Crystal
4.1
With a language disappearing every two weeks and neologisms springing up almost daily, an understanding of the origins and currency of language has never seemed more relevant. In this charming volume, a narrative history written explicitly for a young audience, expert linguist David Crystal proves why the story of language deserves retelling.
From the first words of an infant to the peculiar modern dialect of text messaging, A Little Book of Language ranges widely, revealing language’s myriad intricacies and quirks. In animated fashion, Crystal sheds light on the development of unique linguistic styles, the origins of obscure accents, and the search for the first written word. He discusses the plight of endangered languages, as well as successful cases of linguistic revitalization. Much more than a history, Crystal’s work looks forward to the future of language, exploring the effect of technology on our day-to-day reading, writing, and speech. Through enlightening tables, diagrams, and quizzes, as well as Crystal’s avuncular and entertaining style, A Little Book of Language will reveal the story of language to be a captivating tale for all ages.
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67
Syntax: A Generative Introduction
Andrew Carnie
4.1
Building on the success of the bestselling first edition, the second edition of this textbook provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major issues in Principles and Parameters syntactic theory, including phrase structure, the lexicon, case theory, movement, and locality conditions.
Includes new and extended problem sets in every chapter, all of which have been annotated for level and skill type Features three new chapters on advanced topics including vP shells, object shells, control, gapping and ellipsis and an additional chapter on advanced topics in binding Offers a brief survey of both Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Succeeds in strengthening the reader's foundational knowledge, and prepares them for more advanced study Supported by an instructor's manual and online resources for students and instructors, available at www.blackwellpublishing.com/carnie
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68
Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind
Margalit Fox
4.1
Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of "Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind." There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now.A "New York Times" reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In "Talking Hands, " she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language.
Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as "Talking Hands" grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered.
"Talking Hands" offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind.
Written in lyrical, accessible prose, "Talking Hands" will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places.
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69
What Language Is: And What It Isn't and What It Could Be
John McWhorter
4.1
A provocative look at how languages originate, divide, multiply, and work.
Most of our assumptions about language are wrong. Language is not pure. Language is not only words. Language is not divided into real languages and "dialects". Language is not what we write on a page. So what, then, is a language? In this bold and bright book, John McWhorter asks us to do a simple thing: to look at language the way a linguist does. And once we make that leap, we see a whole new world of human communication, celebrating everything from ancient Persian to the Navajo language to "baby mama".
What Language Is argues that any language, left untouched, becomes more ingrown over time. Only adults attempting to learn a language (and constructively butchering it) can strip it down. Diving into the astounding complexities of Navajo, McWhorter outlines how a language can become downright disheveled, with more exceptions than rules. Looking at an African language called Twi, McWhorter elucidates how even tongues that sound primitive to the untrained ear enfold immense intricacies, and how what sounds like "improper" language actually constitute new and exciting grammar. McWhorter then examines the difference between written and oral language, and explains that, to a linguist, the notion that the written word is somehow elevated over the spoken in downright bizarre, especially because only two hundred of the world's six thousand languages are written. McWhorter also looks at the way languages cross-pollinate each other and occasionally become entirely new creatures via the example of Saramaccan, a wonderful languages that combines African languages with English, Dutch, and Portuguese.
What Language Is is a riveting and iconoclastic look not just at how we communicate, but also at how we think.
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70
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
Simon Singh
4.1
In his first book since the bestselling Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logistical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure, The Code Book tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.
Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world's most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history and what drives it. It will also make yo wonder how private that e-mail you just sent really is.
In an era when communication has become increasingly diverse and complex, this classic work on semantics—now fully revised and updated—distills the relationship between language and those who use it.
Renowned professor and former U.S. Senator S. I. Hayakawa discusses the role of language in human life, the many functions of language, and how language—sometimes without our knowing—shapes our thinking in this engaging and highly respected book. Provocative and erudite, it examines the relationship between language and racial and religious prejudice; the nature and dangers of advertising from a linguistic point of view; and, in an additional chapter called “The Empty Eye,” the content, form, and hidden message of television, from situation comedies to news coverage to political advertising.
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72
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
James W. Pennebaker
4.1
We spend our lives communicating. In the last fifty years, we've zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to tablet computers, text messages to tweets. We generate more and more words with each passing day. Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel.
In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints.
Using innovative analytic techniques, Pennebaker X-rays everything from Craigslist advertisements to the Federalist Papers-or your own writing, in quizzes you can take yourself-to yield unexpected insights. Who would have predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that a world leader's use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he led his country into war? You'll learn why it's bad when politicians use "we" instead of "I," what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge's syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion. Barack Obama, Sylvia Plath, and King Lear are among the figures who make cameo appearances in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying-whether we mean them to or not.
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73
How the Mind Works
Steven Pinker
4.1
In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, "No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him." The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997 Featured in Time magazine, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nature, Science, Lingua Franca, and Science Times Front-page reviews in the Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe Book Section, and the San Diego Union Book Review
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Recommended by Dan Kaminsky.
Dan Kaminsky
@DanielMiessler @balajis How The Mind Works being the formative book of my intellectual career makes this particularly interesting. I don’t always agree with Pinker but that’s not a requirement. [source]
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74
The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu
Dan Jurafsky
4.0
Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu?
In The Language of Food, Stanford University professor and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky peels away the mysteries from the foods we think we know. Thirteen chapters evoke the joy and discovery of reading a menu dotted with the sharp-eyed annotations of a linguist.
Jurafsky points out the subtle meanings hidden in filler words like "rich" and "crispy," zeroes in on the metaphors and storytelling tropes we rely on in restaurant reviews, and charts a microuniverse of marketing language on the back of a bag of potato chips.
The fascinating journey through The Language of Food uncovers a global atlas of culinary influences. With Jurafsky's insight, words like ketchup, macaron, and even salad become living fossils that contain the patterns of early global exploration that predate our modern fusion-filled world.
From ancient recipes preserved in Sumerian song lyrics to colonial shipping routes that first connected East and West, Jurafsky paints a vibrant portrait of how our foods developed. A surprising history of culinary exchange—a sharing of ideas and culture as much as ingredients and flavors—lies just beneath the surface of our daily snacks, soups, and suppers.
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75
How Languages are Learned
Patsy M. Lightbown, Nina Spada
4.0
An introduction to the main theories of first and second language acquisition (now in a new, updated edition).
Unlike many introductions to the field of language acquisition research, How Languages are Learned does not assume that you are already familiar with research methods or theories. This makes it especially suitable if you are a trainee teacher or a practising teacher working independently to develop your professional knowledge. It is written in a clear, readable style without unnecessary technical jargon - this has helped to make it a standard text for trainee teachers throughout the world.
There are evaluations and case studies throughout the book so that you can see a practical context for the research ideas you are reading about. Many of these examples are taken directly from real first and second language classrooms. There are also a number of opportunities for you to practise some of the observation and analysis techniques which are used in the research described in the book.
The book is organized into seven chapters:
Chapter 1: 'Language Learning in early childhood' (Includes a new section on childhood bilingualism.)
Chapter 2: 'Explaining second language learning' (Includes new material for the 3rd edition on skill learning, connectionism, and the 'noticing hypothesis'.)
Chapter 3: 'Individual differences in second language learning' (Topics covered include: intelligence, aptitude, learning styles, personality, motivation and attitudes, identity and ethic group affiliation, and learner beliefs.)
Chapter 4: 'Learner language' (Describes the features and sequence of language development and includes discussion of how second language learning is affected by the student's first language)
Chapter 5: 'Observing learning and teaching in the second language' (Looks at different learning environments and then discusses ways of observing and reporting on them.)
Chapter 6: 'Second language learning in the classroom' (Contains six practical proposals for classroom teaching based on research findings and insights.)
Chapter 7: 'Popular ideas about language learning revisited' (The authors list and give their personal perspective on some commonly held beliefs about language learning.)
There is a Glossary to explain new and technical terms used in the book. There is also a list of suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, as well as a full bibliography at the end of the book.
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76
Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction
William O'Grady, John Archibald, et al.
4.0
Contemporary Linguistics is one of the most comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of linguistics, balancing engaging aspects of language study with solid coverage of the basics. Up-to-date scholarship, a direct approach, and a lucid writing style makes it appealing to instructors and beginning students alike and a resource that many students continue to use beyond the classroom.
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77
Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages
Derek Bickerton
4.0
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78
Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society
Peter Trudgill
4.0
This is a classic book on a fascinating subject. Peter Trudgill examines the close link between language and society and the many factors that influence the way we speak. These range from gender, environment, age, race, class, region and politics. Trudgill's book surveys languages and societies from all over the world drawing on examples from Afrikaans to Yiddish. He has added a fascinating chapter on the development of a language as a result of a non-native speaker's use of it. Compelling and authoritative, this new edition of a bestselling book is set to redraw the boundaries of the study of sociolinguistics.
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79
American Sign Language Dictionary
Martin L.A. Sternberg
4.0
An illustrated abridgment of the most authoritative reference book on sign language, with well-written and easily understood instructions for the use of each sign. More than 5,000 signs and 8,000 illustrations. And now includes more than 500 new signs and 1,500 new illustrations.
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80
The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language
Mark Forsyth
4.0
The Horologicon (or book of hours) gives you the most extraordinary words in the English language, arranged according to the hour of the day when you really need them.
Do you wake up feeling rough? Then you’re philogrobolized. Pretending to work? That’s fudgelling, which may lead to rizzling if you feel sleepy after lunch, though by dinner time you will have become a sparkling deipnosophist.
From Mark Forsyth, author of the bestselling The Etymologicon, this is a book of weird words for familiar situations. From ante-jentacular to snudge by way of quafftide and wamblecropt, at last you can say, with utter accuracy, exactly what you mean.
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81
Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition
Daniel Jurafsky, James H. Martin
4.0
This book offers a unified vision of speech and language processing, presenting state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques for both speech and text-based processing of natural language. This comprehensive work covers both statistical and symbolic approaches to language processing; it shows how they can be applied to important tasks such as speech recognition, spelling and grammar correction, information extraction, search engines, machine translation, and the creation of spoken-language dialog agents. The following distinguishing features make the text both an introduction to the field and an advanced reference guide.
- UNIFIED AND COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF THE FIELD Covers the fundamental algorithms of each field, whether proposed for spoken or written language, whether logical or statistical in origin. - EMPHASIS ON WEB AND OTHER PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS Gives readers an understanding of how language-related algorithms can be applied to important real-world problems. - EMPHASIS ON SCIENTIFIC EVALUATION Offers a description of how systems are evaluated with each problem domain. - EMPERICIST/STATISTICAL/MACHINE LEARNING APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE PROCESSING Covers all the new statistical approaches, while still completely covering the earlier more structured and rule-based methods.
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82
Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Michael Erard
4.0
In the tradition of the bestsellers Word Freak and The Language Instinct comes a fascinating exploration of linguistic superlearners whose abilities shed light on the intellectual potential in us all.
What do an Italian cardinal, a Connecticut blacksmith, and a German diplomat have in common with an MIT linguist, a Hungarian translator, and a Scottish church organist? They were all "hyperpolyglots," "language superlearners," or "massive multilinguals." In Babel No More, Michael Erard delves into the lives and minds of these intriguing individuals both past and present and discovers the upper limit of the human ability to learn, speak, and remember languages.
Hyperpolyglots - people who, by one definition, can use six or more languages - are fascinating not simply because what they do is out of the ordinary. Rather, their accomplishments serve as a point of reference for the rest of us; in some ways they are what the author calls a gifted neural tribe, absorbing language for reasons, and with methods, that few people would emulate. But they are also marked by simple, if dogged, methods: the most prolific multilingual in history, Cardinal Mezzofanti, used flashcards. Taken together, their pursuits present a natural experiment into the limits and the nature of memory and language.
Part scientific detective story, part travelogue, part valentine to anyone who's ever hoped to sprechen or parler something other than a mother tongue, Babel No More takes us all over the world to look at language learning in an entirely new way.
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83
Garner's Modern American Usage
Bryan A. Garner
4.0
The first edition of Garner's Modern American Usage established Bryan Garner as "an American equivalent of Fowler" (Library Journal). With more than 23,500 copies sold, this witty, accessible, and engaging book has become the new classic reference work praised by professional copyeditors as well as the general public looking for clear advice on how to write more effectively. In 1999, Choice magazine named it an Outstanding Academic Book and the American Library Association dubbed it an Outstanding Reference Source. With thousands of succinct entries, longer essays on key issues and problematic areas, and up-to-the-minute judgments on everything from trendy words to the debate over personal pronouns, GMAU is approachable yet authoritative. Since the book first appeared in 1998, Bryan Garner has diligently continued tracking how we use our language. The second edition includes hundreds of new entries ranging from Dubya to weaponize (coined in 1984 but used extensively since 9/11) to foot-and-mouth, plethora (a "highfalutin equivalent of too many"), Slang, Standard English, and Dialects. It also updates hundreds of existing entries. Meanwhile, Garner has written a major essay on the great grammar debate between descriptivists and prescriptivists. Painstakingly researched with copious citations from books and newspapers and newsmagazines, this new edition furthers Garner's mission to help everyone become a better writer, and to enjoy it in the process.
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Recommended by Mark Nichol.
Mark Nichol
This book is the closest thing Americans have to a national authority. [source]
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84
Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives
George Lakoff
4.0
Don't Think of An Elephant! is the antidote to the last forty years of conservative strategizing and the right wing's stranglehold on political dialogue in the United States.
Author George Lakoff explains how conservatives think, and how to counter their arguments. He outlines in detail the traditional American values that progressives hold, but are often unable to articulate. Lakoff also breaks down the ways in which conservatives have framed the issues, and provides examples of how progressives can reframe them.
Lakoff’s years of research and work with leading activists and policy makers have been distilled into this essential guide, which shows progressives how to think in terms of values instead of programs, and why people support policies which align with their values and identities, but which often run counter to their best interests.
Don't Think of an Elephant! is the definitive handbook for understanding and communicating effectively about key issues in the 2004 election, and beyond. Read it, take action—and help take America back.
These two books are the two best books of political thinking and theater from both the left and the right. Regardless of ideologies, both are experts in influencing and leading public perception through image and words. It actually matters whether we’re talking about illegal immigrants or undocumented workers, or whether we describe the problem as climate change or global warming. Strategists need to understand the power of language and framing–it doesn’t matter how right you are, if you lose this battle it can be impossible to rally people to your cause. Read both these books. [source]
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85
The World's Major Languages
Bernard Comrie
4.0
From English, French, Spanish and Russian to Pashto, Tagalog, and Swahili, this is the first comprehensive reference work to provide detailed information about the world's forty major languages. Written by acknowledged specialists in the field, the volume begins with a general introduction to language and language families, followed by language-family sections that provide an informative essay about that language, and individual chapters that discuss the history, distribution, syntax, grammar and punctuation, writing and spelling systems, standards of usage, and other important aspects of each language.
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86
Language Death
David Crystal
4.0
The rapid endangerment and death of many minority languages across the world is a matter of widespread concern, not only among linguists and anthropologists but among all interested in the issues of cultural identity in an increasingly globalized culture. A leading commentator and popular writer on langauge issues, David Crystal asks the fundamental question, "Why is language death so important?," reviews the reason for the current crisis, and investigates what is being done to reduce its impact. By some counts, only 600 of the 6,000 or so languages in the world are "safe" from the threat of extinction. By some reckonings, the world will, by the end of the twenty-first century, be dominated by a small number of major languages. Language Death provides a stimulating and accessible account of this alarming trend, which, like the large-scale destruction of the environment, is both peculiarly modern and increasingly global. Language Death includes intelligent argument and moving descriptions of the decline and demise of particular languages, as well as practical advise for anyone interested in pursuing the subject further. David Crystal is a leading authority on language, and author of many books, including most recently Language and the Internet, (Cambridge, 2001). He is author or editor of several other books with Cambridge, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1997), Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995), English as a Global Langauge (1997), Language Death (2000); and Words on Words (University of Chicago, 2000). An internationally renowned writer, journal editor, lecturer and braodcaster, he received an Order of the British Empire in 1995 for his services to the English language.
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87
A Course in Phonetics
Peter Ladefoged
4.0
Master linguistics with A COURSE IN PHONETICS with accompanying CD-ROM The hallmark text for the study of linguistics, A COURSE IN PHONETICS provides a broad overview of the branches of phonetics for students with no prior knowledge. Practicing what you have learned is easy with the CD-ROM that contains more than 4,000 audio files, including recordings of speech from southern and northern U.S. cities, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, New Zealand, other forms of English, and scores of other languages.
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88
EASY-TO-READ CROSSWORD PUZZLES FOR ADULTS: LARGE-PRINT, MEDIUM-LEVEL PUZZLES THAT ENTERTAIN AND CHALLENGE
Jenny Patterson
4.0
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89
Pragmatics
George Yule, H. G. Widdowson
4.0
This is an introduction to pragmatics, the study of how people make sense of each other linguistically. The author explains, and illustrates, basic concepts such as the co-operative principle, deixis, and speech acts, providing a clear, concise foundation for further study.
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90
The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages
K. David Harrison
4.0
Part travelogue and part scientist's notebook, The Last Speakers is the poignant chronicle of author K. David Harrison's expeditions around the world to meet with last speakers of vanishing languages. The speakers' eloquent reflections and candid photographs reveal little-known lifeways as well as revitalization efforts to teach disappearing languages to younger generations. Thought-provoking and engaging, this unique book illuminates the global language-extinction crisis through photos, graphics, interviews, traditional wisdom never before translated into English, and first-person essays that thrillingly convey the adventure of science and exploration.
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91
The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics
John Pollack
4.0
The pun is commonly dismissed as the lowest form of wit, and punsters are often unpopular for their obsessive wordplay. But such attitudes are relatively recent developments. In The Pun Also Rises, John Pollack-a former World Pun Champion and presidential speechwriter for Bill Clinton-explains why such wordplay is significant: It both revolutionized language and played a pivotal role in making the modern world possible. Skillfully weaving together stories and evidence from history, brain science, pop culture, literature, anthropology, and humor, The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth.At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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92
The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth
Ruth S. Noel
4.0
The same delight that led Tolkien to invent fourteen different languages and assorted alphabets for his Middle-earth dwellers now leads many of his fans to puzzle out translations for the Rohirrim's battle cries and to write their love letters in Elvish.
Here is the perfect handbook for all such enthusiasts as well as for serious students of language. It includes a full account of Tolkien the linguist, as well as telling how to write all the languages, with guides to grammar and pronunciation, and a complete dictionary of the fourteen languages.
Here is a book to deepen and enhance our enjoyment of those classics of Middle-earth, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
Ruth Noel teaches remedial and developmental reading in Riverside, California. She is the author of The Mythology of Middle-earth, on the relation between The Lord of the Rings and European myth in general. "The author is convincing and fascinating as she connects Tolkien's fantasies with the hallowed myths of other cultures." - Publishers Weekly
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93
The ABC's of LGBT+
Ashley Mardell
4.0
Hello and welcome to the ABC’s of LGBT. Ashley Mardell, one of the most trusted voices on YouTube presents a detailed look at all things LGBT+. Along with in-depth written definitions, personal anecdotes, helpful infographics, links to online videos, and more, Mardell aims to provide a friendly voice to a community looking for information.
Beyond those searching for a label, this book is also for allies and LGBT+ people simply looking to pack in some extra knowledge! Knowledge is a critical part of acceptance, learning about new identities broadens our understanding of humanity, heightens our empathy, and allows us different, valuable perspectives. These words also provide greater precision when describing attractions and identities. There is never anything wrong with having and efficient, expansive vocabulary!
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94
Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing
Melissa Mohr
4.0
Almost everyone swears, or worries about not swearing, from the two year-old who has just discovered the power of potty mouth to the grandma who wonders why every other word she hears is obscene. Whether they express anger or exhilaration, are meant to insult or to commend, swear words perform a crucial role in language. But swearing is also a uniquely well-suited lens through which to look at history, offering a fascinating record of what people care about on the deepest levels of a culture--what's divine, what's terrifying, and what's taboo.
Holy Sh*t tells the story of two kinds of swearing--obscenities and oaths--from ancient Rome and the Bible to today. With humor and insight, Melissa Mohr takes readers on a journey to discover how "swearing" has come to include both testifying with your hand on the Bible and calling someone a *#amp;!* when they cut you off on the highway. She explores obscenities in ancient Rome--which were remarkably similar to our own--and unearths the history of religious oaths in the Middle Ages, when swearing (or not swearing) an oath was often a matter of life and death. Holy Sh*t also explains the advancement of civility and corresponding censorship of language in the 18th century, considers the rise of racial slurs after World War II, examines the physiological effects of swearing (increased heart rate and greater pain tolerance), and answers a question that preoccupies the FCC, the US Senate, and anyone who has recently overheard little kids at a playground: are we swearing more now than people did in the past?
A gem of lexicography and cultural history, Holy Sh*t is a serious exploration of obscenity--and it also just might expand your repertoire of words to choose from the next time you shut your finger in the car door.
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95
You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
Robert Lane Greene
4.0
What is it about other people’s language that moves some of us to anxiety or even rage? For centuries, sticklers the world over have donned the cloak of authority to control the way people use words. Now this sensational new book strikes back to defend the fascinating, real-life diversity of this most basic human faculty.
With the erudite yet accessible style that marks his work as a journalist, Robert Lane Greene takes readers on a rollicking tour around the world, illustrating with vivid anecdotes the role language beliefs play in shaping our identities, for good and ill. Beginning with literal myths, from the Tower of Babel to the bloody origins of the word “shibboleth,” Greene shows how language “experts” went from myth-making to rule-making and from building cohesive communities to building modern nations. From the notion of one language’s superiority to the common perception that phrases like “It’s me” are “bad English,” linguistic beliefs too often define “us” and distance “them,” supporting class, ethnic, or national prejudices. In short: What we hear about language is often really about the politics of identity.
Governments foolishly try to police language development (the French Academy), nationalism leads to the violent suppression of minority languages (Kurdish and Basque), and even Americans fear that the most successful language in world history (English) may be threatened by increased immigration. These false language beliefs are often tied to harmful political ends and can lead to the violation of basic human rights. Conversely, political involvement in language can sometimes prove beneficial, as with the Zionist revival of Hebrew or our present-day efforts to provide education in foreign languages essential to business, diplomacy, and intelligence. And yes, standardized languages play a crucial role in uniting modern societies.
As this fascinating book shows, everything we’ve been taught to think about language may not be wrong—but it is often about something more than language alone. You Are What You Speak will certainly get people talking.
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96
The Story of French
Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow
4.0
Why does everything sound better if it's said in French? That fascination is at the heart of The Story of French, the first history of one of the most beautiful languages in the world that was, at one time, the pre-eminent language of literature, science and diplomacy. Nadeau and Barlow chart the history of a language spoken as a native tongue by 130 million people around the globe. The first document written in the French was signed by the sons of Charlemagne in 832. After this, Latin was purged from the courts of France by Francois 1st, giving root to French speakers' 21st century obsession with language protection. The obsession progressed as Cardinal Richelieu established the French Academy, a group entrusted with the responsibility of keeping the language pure and eloquent. As French circled the globe, the international cast of characters included Montaigne, Catherine the Great, Frederic II of Prussia, the guides of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Jules Verne, and others. Let Nadeau and Barlow guide you through the story of a language used to write some of the world's great masterpieces of literature, construct some of the most important documents of diplomacy, bedevil millions with its vagaries of pronunciation and beguile everyone with its beauty.
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97
The Only Grammar Book You'll Ever Need: A One-Stop Source for Every Writing Assignment
Susan Thurman and Larry Shea
4.0
Never stress over a comma, colon, or dash again!
The Only Grammar Book You'll Ever Need is the ideal resource for everyone who wants to produce writing that is clear, concise, and grammatically excellent. Whether you're creating perfect professional documents, spectacular school papers, or effective personal letters, you'll find this handbook indispensable. From word choice to punctuation to organization, English teacher Susan Thurman guides you through getting your thoughts on paper with polish. Using dozens of examples, The Only Grammar Book You'll Ever Need provides guidelines for:
–Understanding the parts of speech and elements of a sentence –Avoiding the most common grammar and punctuation mistakes –Using correct punctuating in every sentence –Writing clearly and directly –Approaching writing projects, whether big or small
Easy to follow and authoritative, The Only Grammar Book You'll Ever Need provides all the necessary tools to make you successful with every type of written expression.
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98
Embassytown
China Mieville
4.0
In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.
Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.
When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties—to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.
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99
Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing
Tiffany Yates Martin
4.0
"I trust Tiffany Yates Martin with the editing process even more than I trust myself. Read this book and steal her secrets!"--Kelly Harms, Washington Post-bestselling author of The Overdue Life of Amy Byler
"Tiffany Yates Martin is an exceptional editor, so of course her advice and counsel in Intuitive Editing is exceptional as well. Whether you're a seasoned author looking to fine-tune your craft, pacing, or tension or just starting out and looking for guidance on building overall structure and engaging characters, this book is a must-read that will take you from idea to finished manuscript."--New York Times-bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch
"This book is a must have tool every author needs in their toolkit. When you are ready to go deeper, to dig into the revision process, using Tiffany's Intuitive Editing strategies will help you take your writing to the next level."--New York Times- and USA Today-bestselling author Steena Holmes
"Authors, if you can't be lucky enough to have Tiffany as your editor, then Intuitive Editing is the next-best thing. Her advice is sound, thoughtful, no-nonsense and given with the compassion that every author and their book deserves."--Elisabeth Weed, literary agent, the Book Group
"Editing your own writing can feel like doing your own brain surgery...."
After you've completed your manuscript and you're standing at the foot of Revision Mountain, climbing to the summit can feel impossible. It's hard to look at your own writing with the objective eye needed to shape it into a tight, polished, publishable story--but just like writing, self-editing is a skill you can learn.
Developmental editor Tiffany Yates Martin has spent her career in the publishing industry honing practical, actionable techniques to help authors evaluate how well their story is working, where it might not be, and how to fix it.
With a clear, accessible, user-friendly approach, she leads writers through every step of deepening and elevating their own work, as well as how to approach the edit and develop their "editor brain," and how to solicit and process feedback. Intuitive Editing doesn't offer one-size-fits-all advice or rigid writing "rules"; instead it helps authors discover what works for their story and their style--to find the best version of their vision.
Whether you're writing fiction, narrative nonfiction, or memoir; whether this your first story or your fiftieth, Intuitive Editing will give you the tools you need to edit and revise your own writing with inspiration, motivation, and confidence.
Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and bestselling authors as well as newer writers. She's led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers' groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers' sites and publications. Visit her at www.foxprinteditorial.com.
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100
Language Change: Progress or Decay?
Jean Aitchison
4.0
This book gives a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change, discussing where our evidence about language change comes from, how and why changes happen, and how languages begin and end. It considers both changes that occurred long ago, and those currently in progress. This substantially revised third edition includes two new chapters on change of meaning and grammaticalization. New sections have been added to other chapters, as well as over 150 new references. The work remains nontechnical in style and accessible to the reader with no previous knowledge of linguistics.
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Recommended by Lane Greene and Simon Baron-Cohen.
