Historical & Comparative

A dramatic account of the rate of language extinction, and how it endangers the future of biodiversity Few people know that nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia's 250...

'Quite simply, and quite ridiculously, one of the funniest and most illuminating books I have ever read. I thought I was obsessive, but Keith Kahn-Harris is playing a very different sport. He really has discovered the whole world in an egg.' Simon...

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 concerned with issues of cultural identity in an increasingly globalized culture...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907165320Author George McLennanFormat PaperbackPage Count 86Imprint New Argyll PublishingPublisher AkerbeltzWeight(grams) 91gDimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm...

In this brilliant transatlantic survival guide, Erin Moore examines the key differences between the British and the Americans through their language. You'll discover why Americans give - and take - so many bloody compliments and never, ever say 'shall'...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907165429Author George McLennanFormat PaperbackPage Count 54Imprint New Argyll PublishingPublisher Akerbeltz

'His cornucopia of tellers and tales is a delight, a riveting celebration of a genre that revels in its own hybridity and the imaginative riches produced by the crossing of cultural and literary borders' Financial Times'Like a child after the Pied Piper...

In Amazonian Quichua Language and Life: Introduction to Grammar, Ecology, and Discourse from Pastaza and Upper Napo, Janis B. Nuckolls and Tod D. Swanson discuss two varieties of Quichua, an indigenous Ecuadorian language. Drawing on their linguistic and...

This textbook provides a comprehensive scholarly introduction to Classical Chinese and its texts. Classical Chinese is the language of Confucius and Mencius and their contemporaries, who wrote the seminal texts of Chinese philosophy more than 2,000 years...

This book contains over fifty passages of Latin from 200 BC to AD 900, each with translation and linguistic commentary. It is not intended as an elementary reader (though suitable for university courses), but as an illustrative history of Latin covering...

The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780060520854Author Professor of Linguistics John McWhorterFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint HarperCollins PublishersPublisher HarperCollins Publishers...

Since its publication in 2008, A Grammar of the Hittite Language has been the definitive Hittite reference and teaching tool. This new edition brings Hoffner and Melchert's essential work up to date, incorporating the dramatic progress achieved in the...

An Introduction to Middle English combines an elementary grammar of the English language from about 1100 to about 1500 with a selection of texts for reading, ranging in date from 1154 to 1500. The grammar includes the fundamentals of orthography,...

'Quite simply, and quite ridiculously, one of the funniest and most illuminating books I have ever read. I thought I was obsessive, but Keith Kahn-Harris is playing a very different sport. He really has discovered the whole world in an egg.' Simon...

In How to Kill a Dragon Calvert Watkins follows the continuum of poetic formulae in Indo-European languages, from Old Hittite to medieval Irish. He uses the comparative method to reconstruct traditional poetic formulae of considerable complexity that...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781911476412Author Anthony Poulton-SmithFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Apex Publishing LtdPublisher Apex Publishing LtdWeight(grams)...

A History of the Chinese Language provides a comprehensive introduction to the historical development of the Chinese language from its Proto-Sino-Tibetan roots in prehistoric times to Modern Standard Chinese. Taking a highly accessible and balanced...

Words confirm and deny, guarantee and deceive, elucidate and obfuscate. The more words you know, the better you can express yourself and the more you can do in life. The founder of the website Grandiloquent Word of the Day accordingly presents a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781853993763Author Peter BarkerFormat PaperbackPage Count 78Imprint Bristol Classical PressPublisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLCWeight(grams)...

These interrelated meditations explore the nature of the individual spirit and the individual spiritedness of the natural world. As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, in Sea & Fog, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, and syntactic pleasures...

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780425264379Author Mark ForsythFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Berkley Publishing Corporation,U.S.Publisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams)...

Historians relying on written records can tell us nothing about the 99.9% of human evolution which preceded the invention of writing. It is the study of genetic variation, backed up by language and archaeology, which provides concrete evidence aboutthe...

This is an introduction to the history of languages, from the distant past to a glimpse at what languages may be like in the distant future. It looks at how languages arise, change, and ultimately vanish, and what lies behind their different destinies...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781988755427Author Vincent F PintadoFormat PaperbackPage Count 350Imprint Tir na CraobhPublisher Tir na CraobhWeight(grams) 513gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm...

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...

Reading, like any human activity, has a history. Modern reading is a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually, in a muffled voice. The text format in which thought has been presented to...

This is one of the first systematic attempts to bring language within the neo-Darwinian framework of modern evolutionary theory, without abandoning the vast gains in phonology and syntax achieved by formal linguistics over the past forty years. The...

Nahuatl Nations is a linguistic ethnography that explores the political relations between those Indigenous communities of Mexico that speak the Nahuatl language and the Mexican Nation that claims it as an important national symbol. Author Magnus Pharao...

'Ferrara's book is an introduction to writing as a process of revelation, but it's also a celebration of these things still undeciphered, and many other tantalising mysteries besides.' - The SpectatorThis book tells the story of our greatest invention...

Colloquial Arabic storytelling is most commonly associated with The Thousandvand One Nights. But few people are aware of a much larger corpus of narrative texts known as popular epic. These heroic romantic tales, originating in the Middle Ages, form vast...

'A lively, intelligent and persuasive history of speech...Expertly and patiently explained' The TimesWhy are human beings the only animals that can speak? And why does it matter?If you've ever felt the shock of listening to a recording of your own voice,...

Based on poetry written when he was Poet in Residence at Anne Hathaway's Cottage in 2016, Gregory Leadbetter's Caliban is a dramatic and intriguing new story based on an imagined life of Shakespeare's enigmatic 'thing of darkness' after the events of The...

A unique analysis of the intensive interest in Jewish culture of early modern Christian Humanists as a part of their comprehensive program of study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The book focuses on how that interest was particularly manifested in a score...

This volume is a significant contribution to the study of the ancient Greek vocabulary used to describe the local origins of individuals. It sheds much new light on ancient grammarians, and other ancient writers (many of them 'lost' in the sense that...

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome's fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this "dead language" is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781912557783Author Dr Jenny HarrisFormat PaperbackPage Count 106Imprint RAR Medical ServicesPublisher UniAdmissionsWeight(grams) 210gDimensions(mm) 229mm *...

Had you said "What a guy!" in 17th-century England, anyone would have understood you were admiring a flaming effigy of Guy Fawkes of the Gunpowder Treason Plot. How times have changed! In America and, indeed, most of the English-speaking world, "guy"...

English is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world, with native-speaking communities at the furthest ends of the earth. However, just three thousand years ago, the language-which-became-English was not spoken anywhere in Britain. Trudgill,...