Historical & Comparative

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...

This book sets up a consistent theoretical and terminological framework for the study of the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the terms transitivity, valency, and voice. These three concepts are at the heart of the most basic aspects of clausal...

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...

'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...

It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! This is one of Shakespeare's most famous lines and one of the most well-known metaphors in literature. But metaphor is much more than a mere literary device employed by love-struck poets when they refer to their...

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...

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,...

A revelatory and exhilarating tour de force, Nicholas Ostler's The Last Lingua Franca: The Rise and Fall of World Languages explores the rise of a linguistic diversity we could never before have imagined. In the twenty-first century, can we really take...

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 *...

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,...

Word Origins is the only guide to the science and process of etymology for the layperson. This funny, charming, and conversational book not only tells the known origins of hundreds of words, but also shows how their origins were determined. Liberman, an...

This general introduction to the study of the Chinese language traces its history from its beginings in the second millennium BC to the present day and provides a clear picture of the contemporary language and its sociolinguistic status. Chinese in its...

For anyone who has ever wondered why English is so weird, an entertaining and expert tour of the most puzzling parts of our language. Maybe you've been speaking English all your life, or maybe you learned it later on. But whether you use it just well...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781250049049Author Jean-Benoit NadeauFormat PaperbackPage Count 448Imprint St. Martin's GriffinPublisher St. Martin's GriffinWeight(grams)...

What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the...

Changing English examines the history of English from its origins in the fifth century to the present day. It focuses on the radical changes that have taken place in the structure of English over a millennium and a half, detailing the influences of...

It is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted. What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is. Steven Roger Fischer charts the history of language from the times of Homo erectus,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780971385849Author S M NewtonFormat PaperbackPage Count 214Imprint Michael NewtonPublisher Michael Newton

Like Carl Darling Buck's Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (1933), this book is an explanation of the similarities and differences between Greek and Latin morphology and lexicon through an account of their prehistory. It also aims to discuss the...

This book examines the impact of ancient DNA research and scientific evidence on our understanding of the emergence of Indo-European languages in prehistory. Offering cutting-edge contributions from an international team of scholars, it considers the...

Not a how-to text, this beguiling book is instead a fascinating look at Chinese language and culture. Ranging through history, literature, folklore, linguistics, and sociology, this is a breezy, straightforward primer of surprising breadth.About the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780993180842Author Phil WilliamsFormat PaperbackPage Count 102Imprint Rumian PublishingPublisher Rumian PublishingWeight(grams) 195gDimensions(mm) 229mm *...

Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers, Second Edition reveals the trajectory of the Greek language from the Mycenaean period of the second millennium BC to the current day. Offers a complete linguistic treatment of the history of the Greek...

Exploring Celtic Origins is the fruit of collaborative work by researchers in archaeology, historical linguistics, and archaeogenetics over the past ten years. This team works towards the goal of a better understanding of the background in the Bronze Age...

Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a...