Download or read book The Book of Languages written by Mick Webb and published by Owlkids. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Take a tour of 21 of the world's most commonly spoken languages!"--Back cover.

Download or read book The Loom of Language written by Frederick Bodmer and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1985 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. 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 language as it is actually used in everyday life.

Download or read book Babel written by Gaston Dorren and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it’s just so much fun to read.” —NPR English is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn’t speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s people in their mother tongues, you’d need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Whisking readers along on a delightful journey, he traces how these languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and shows how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics, elegant but complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to outsiders. Babel reveals why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren also shares his experiences studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten myths about Chinese characters, and discovers the region where Swahili became the lingua franca. Witty and utterly fascinating, Babel will change how you look at and listen to the world. “Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Download or read book Worldwide Multilingual Phrase Book written by Eric Dondero R. and published by . This book was released on 2002-02-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks written by Bruce Tate and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2014-11-19 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great programmers aren't born--they're made. The industry is moving from object-oriented languages to functional languages, and you need to commit to radical improvement. New programming languages arm you with the tools and idioms you need to refine your craft. While other language primers take you through basic installation and "Hello, World," we aim higher. Each language in Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks will take you on a step-by-step journey through the most important paradigms of our time. You'll learn seven exciting languages: Lua, Factor, Elixir, Elm, Julia, MiniKanren, and Idris. Learn from the award-winning programming series that inspired the Elixir language. Hear how other programmers across broadly different communities solve problems important enough to compel language development. Expand your perspective, and learn to solve multicore and distribution problems. In each language, you'll solve a non-trivial problem, using the techniques that make that language special. Write a fully functional game in Elm, without a single callback, that compiles to JavaScript so you can deploy it in any browser. Write a logic program in Clojure using a programming model, MiniKanren, that is as powerful as Prolog but much better at interacting with the outside world. Build a distributed program in Elixir with Lisp-style macros, rich Ruby-like syntax, and the richness of the Erlang virtual machine. Build your own object layer in Lua, a statistical program in Julia, a proof in code with Idris, and a quiz game in Factor. When you're done, you'll have written programs in five different programming paradigms that were written on three different continents. You'll have explored four languages on the leading edge, invented in the past five years, and three more radically different languages, each with something significant to teach you.

Download or read book Domain Specific Languages written by Martin Fowler and published by Pearson Education. This book was released on 2010-09-23 with total page 796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When carefully selected and used, Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) may simplify complex code, promote effective communication with customers, improve productivity, and unclog development bottlenecks. In Domain-Specific Languages, noted software development expert Martin Fowler first provides the information software professionals need to decide if and when to utilize DSLs. Then, where DSLs prove suitable, Fowler presents effective techniques for building them, and guides software engineers in choosing the right approaches for their applications. This book’s techniques may be utilized with most modern object-oriented languages; the author provides numerous examples in Java and C#, as well as selected examples in Ruby. Wherever possible, chapters are organized to be self-standing, and most reference topics are presented in a familiar patterns format. Armed with this wide-ranging book, developers will have the knowledge they need to make important decisions about DSLs—and, where appropriate, gain the significant technical and business benefits they offer. The topics covered include: How DSLs compare to frameworks and libraries, and when those alternatives are sufficient Using parsers and parser generators, and parsing external DSLs Understanding, comparing, and choosing DSL language constructs Determining whether to use code generation, and comparing code generation strategies Previewing new language workbench tools for creating DSLs

Download or read book Playing with Languages written by Amy L. Paugh and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children’s agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children’s cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.

Download or read book Extraterrestrial Languages written by Daniel Oberhaus and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand? The endlessly fascinating question of whether we are alone in the universe has always been accompanied by another, more complicated one: if there is extraterrestrial life, how would we communicate with it? In this book, Daniel Oberhaus leads readers on a quest for extraterrestrial communication. Exploring Earthlings' various attempts to reach out to non-Earthlings over the centuries, he poses some not entirely answerable questions: If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand? What languages will they (and we) speak? Is there not only a universal grammar (as Noam Chomsky has posited), but also a grammar of the universe? Oberhaus describes, among other things, a late-nineteenth-century idea to communicate with Martians via Morse code and mirrors; the emergence in the twentieth century of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), CETI (communication with extraterrestrial intelligence), and finally METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence); the one-way space voyage of Ella, an artificial intelligence agent that can play cards, tell fortunes, and recite poetry; and the launching of a theremin concert for aliens. He considers media used in attempts at extraterrestrial communication, from microwave systems to plaques on spacecrafts to formal logic, and discusses attempts to formulate a language for our message, including the Astraglossa and two generations of Lincos (lingua cosmica). The chosen medium for interstellar communication reveals much about the technological sophistication of the civilization that sends it, Oberhaus observes, but even more interesting is the information embedded in the message itself. In Extraterrestrial Languages, he considers how philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, science, and art have informed the design or limited the effectiveness of our interstellar messaging.

Download or read book Mining Language written by Allison Margaret Bigelow and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

Download or read book The World s Major Languages written by Bernard Comrie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 1125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World's Major Languages features over 50 of the world's languages and language families. This revised edition includes updated bibliographies for each chapter and up-to-date census figures. The featured languages have been chosen based on the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance. Each language is looked at in depth, and the chapters provide information on both grammatical features and on salient features of the language's history and cultural role. The World’s Major Languages is an accessible and essential reference work for linguists.

Download or read book The 5 Love Languages written by Gary Chapman and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 20 million copies sold! A perennial New York Times bestseller for over a decade! Falling in love is easy. Staying in love—that’s the challenge. How can you keep your relationship fresh and growing amid the demands, conflicts, and just plain boredom of everyday life? In the #1 New York Times international bestseller The 5 Love Languages®, you’ll discover the secret that has transformed millions of relationships worldwide. Whether your relationship is flourishing or failing, Dr. Gary Chapman’s proven approach to showing and receiving love will help you experience deeper and richer levels of intimacy with your partner—starting today. The 5 Love Languages® is as practical as it is insightful. Updated to reflect the complexities of relationships today, this new edition reveals intrinsic truths and applies relevant, actionable wisdom in ways that work. Includes the Love Language assessment so you can discover your love language and that of your loved one.

Download or read book African Languages written by Bernd Heine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-03 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an introduction to African languages and linguistics, covering typology, structure and sociolinguistics. The twelve chapters are written by a team of fifteen eminent Africanists, and their topics include the four major language groupings (Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic and Khoisan), the core areas of modern theoretical linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax), typology, sociolinguistics, comparative linguistics, and language, history and society. Basic concepts and terminology are explained for undergraduates and non-specialist readers, but each chapter also provides an overview of the state of the art in its field, and as such will be referred to also by more advanced students and general linguists. The book brings this range of material together in accessible form for anyone wishing to learn more about this challenging and fascinating field.

Download or read book Lingo written by Gaston Dorren and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into today’s remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Download or read book Languages of the World written by Asya Pereltsvaig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces readers to the rich diversity of human languages, familiarizing them with the variety of languages around the world.

Download or read book When Languages Collide written by Brian D. Joseph and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Mayan Languages written by Judith Aissen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family; includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script; provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages; includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts. Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.

Download or read book In the Land of Invented Languages written by Arika Okrent and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-05-19 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.