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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
This volume looks at the legacy of British history in the way we
talk and the things we say. It takes us from the departure of the
Romans from Britain up to and including the Middle Ages.
The History of the English Language has been a standard university
course offering for over 150 years. Yet relatively little has been
written about teaching a course whose very title suggests its
prodigious chronological, geographic, and disciplinary scope. In
the nineteenth century, History of the English Language courses
focused on canonical British literary works. Since these early
curricula were formed, the English language has changed, and so
have the courses. In the twenty-first century, instructors account
for the growing prominence of World Englishes as well as the
English language's transformative relationship with the internet
and social media. Approaches to Teaching the History of the English
Language addresses the challenges and circumstances that the
course's instructors and students commonly face. The volume reads
as a series of "master classes" taught by experienced instructors
who explain the pedagogical problems that inspired resourceful
teaching practices. Although its chapters are authored by seasoned
teachers, many of whom are preeminent scholars in their individual
fields, the book is designed for instructors at any career
stage-beginners and veterans alike. The topics addressed in
Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language include:
the unique pedagogical dynamic that transpires in language study;
the course's origins and relevance to current university curricula;
scholarly approaches that can offer an abiding focus in a
semester-long course; advice about navigating the course's
formidable chronological ambit; ways to account for the language's
many varieties; and the course's substantial and pedagogical
relationship to contemporary multimedia platforms. Each chapter
balances theory and practice, explaining in detail activities,
assignments, or discussion questions ready for immediate use by
instructors.
Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a
number of languages and language families, along with an account of
the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles. A
cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to functional
category followed by renewal. Some well-known cycles involve
negatives, where full negative phrases are reanalyzed as words and
affixes and are then renewed by full phrases again. Verbal
agreement is another example: full pronouns are reanalyzed as
agreement markers and are renewed again. Each chapter provides data
on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages. Van Gelderen argues
that the cross-linguistic similarities can be seen as Economy
Principles present in the initial cognitive system or Universal
Grammar. She further claims that some of the cycles can be used to
classify a language as analytic or synthetic, and she provides
insight into the shape of the earliest human language and how it
evolved.
All previous Biblical Hebrew lexicons have provided a modern western definition and perspective to Hebrew roots and words. This prevents the reader of the Bible from seeing the ancient authors' original intent of the passages. This is the first Biblical Hebrew lexicon that defines each Hebrew word within its original Ancient Hebrew cultural meaning.
One of the major differences between the Modern Western mind and the Ancient Hebrew's is that their mind related all words and their meanings to a concrete concept. For instance, the Hebrew word "chai" is normally translated as "life", a western abstract meaning, but the original Hebrew concrete meaning of this word is the "stomach". In the Ancient Hebrew mind, a full stomach is a sign of a full "life". The Hebrew language is a root system oriented language and the lexicon is divided into sections reflecting this root system. Each word of the Hebrew Bible is grouped within its roots and is defined according to its original ancient cultural meaning.
Also included in each word entry are its alternative spellings, King James translations of the word and Strong's number.;Indexes are included to assist with finding a word within the lexicon according to its spelling, definition, King James translation or Strong's number.
Lexicon Features:
- An introduction to the Ancient Hebrew alphabet, language and thought.
- The history of the Hebrew script from ancient to modern times.
- Reconstruction of the original Hebrew alphabet and root system of roots and words.
- Alphabetical ordering of Parent, Child and Adopted Roots with .each root listing the Hebrew nouns and verbs derived from the root.
- Ancient Hebrew, Modern Hebrew&nd English transliteration of roots and words.
The action, concrete and abstract meaning of each Hebrew root.
- Ancient Hebrew Cultural definition of Hebrew roots and words.
- Root origins of Hebrew words and their relationship to other roots and words.
- Frequency each word is used in the Hebrew Bible.
- Listing of foreign words found in the Hebrew Bible.
- Index to English translations of Hebrew words, King James Translations of Hebrew words, Strong's numbers and alternate Hebrew spellings of Hebrew words.
The 'face' is the most identifiable feature of the human body, yet
the way it is entrenched in language and cognition has not
previously been explored cross-linguistically. This comparative
volume continues the series on embodied cognition and
conceptualization with a focus on the human 'face'. Each
contribution to this volume presents descriptions and analyses of
how languages name the 'face' and utilize metonymy, metaphor, and
polysemy to extend the 'face' to overlapping target domains. The
contributions include primary and secondary data representing
languages originating from around the world. The chapters represent
multiple theoretical approaches to describing linguistic
embodiment, including cultural, historical, descriptive, and
cognitive frameworks. The findings from this diverse set of
theoretical approaches and languages contribute to general research
in cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics, and onomastics.
Yiddish, the language of Eastern-European Jews, has so far been
mostly described as Germanic within the framework of the
traditional, divergence-based Language Tree Model. Meanwhile,
advances in contact linguistics allow for a new approach, placing
the idiom within the mixed language spectrum, with the Slavic
component playing a significant role. So far, the Slavic elements
were studied as isolated, adstratal borrowings. This book argues
that they represent a coherent system within the grammar. This
suggests that the Slavic languages had at least as much of a
constitutive role in the inception and development of Yiddish as
German and Hebrew. The volume is copiously illustrated with
examples from the vernacular language. With a contribution of Anna
Pilarski, University of Szczecin.
What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of
their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia
and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but
written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet
lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of
contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political
dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such
contacts remain limited. This volume investigates how loanwords can
prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different
regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste,
and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders
of language families, and discusses implications for the social
history of the speech communities.
So this English professor comes into class and starts talking about
the textual organization of jokes, the taxonomy of puns, the
relations between the linguistic form and the content of humorous
texts, and other past and current topics in language-based research
into humor. At the end he stuffs all
This comprehensive guide uses a highly effective teaching method to
introduce readers to New Testament Greek quickly. The book provides
all the basics of a beginning grammar. In addition, it includes a
wealth of reading and translation exercises and activities, helpful
grammatical resources, and accented Greek text. Audio files for the
book are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources. Now
in paper.
How is it possible to write down the Japanese language exclusively
in Chinese characters? And how are we then able to determine the
language behind the veil of the Chinese script as Japanese? The
history of writing in Japan presents us with a fascinating variety
of writing styles ranging from phonography to morphography and all
shades in between. In Japanese Morphography: Deconstructing hentai
kanbun, Gordian Schreiber shows that texts traditionally labelled
as "hentai kanbun" or "variant Chinese" are, in fact,
morphographically written Japanese texts instead and not just the
result of an underdeveloped skill in Chinese. The study fosters our
understanding of writing system typology beyond phonographic
writing.
The vocabulary of past times, no longer used in English, is always
fascinating, especially when we see how it was pilloried by the
satirists of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society,
with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class awareness
and the jargon of steam engines, motor cars and other products of
the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, people had strong feelings
about the flood of new words entering English. Swearing, new street
names and the many borrowings from French provoked continual
irritation and mockery, as did the Americanisms increasingly
encountered in the British press. In this intriguing collection,
David Crystal has pored through the pages of the satirical
magazine, Punch, between its first issue in 1841 and the death of
Queen Victoria in 1901, and extracted the articles and cartoons
that poked fun at the jargon of the day, adding a commentary on the
context of the times and informative glossaries. In doing so he
reveals how many present-day feelings about words have their
origins over a century ago.
Japanese is definitely one of the best-known languages in
typological literature. For example, typologists often assume that
Japanese is a nominative-accusative language. However, it is often
overlooked that Japanese, or more precisely, Tokyo Japanese, is
just one of various local varieties of the Japonic language family
(Japanese and Ryukyuan). In fact, the Japonic languages exhibit a
surprising typological diversity. For example, some varieties
display a split-intransitive as opposed to nominative-accusative
system. The present volume is thus a unique attempt to explore the
typological diversity of Japonic by providing a collection of
grammatical sketches of various local varieties, four from Japanese
dialects and five from Ryukyuan. Each grammatical sketch follows
the same descriptive format, addressing a wide range of typological
topics.
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