Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Historical & Comparative

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...

Creole languages, while complex and nuanced as all human languages are, are delineable from older languages as the result of their having come into existence only a few centuries ago. Then...

Language in Danger is an unsettling historical investigation into the...

Covering more than 2,000 years this important region's history, this book is a groundbreaking contribution to the knowledge of pre-colonial Africa.

Covering more than 2,000 years this important region's history, this book is a groundbreaking contribution to the knowledge of pre-colonial Africa. It is the first historical work to reconstruct a Batwa or Pygmy past, thereby questioning Western epistemologies that have long portrayed the Batwa as a quintessential people without history.

Bill Bryson, bestselling author of The Mother Tongue, now celebrates its magnificent offspring in the book that reveals once and for all how a dusty western hamlet with neither woods nor holly came to be known as Hollywood . . . and exactly why Mr. Yankee Doodle called his befeathered cap "Macaroni."

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.