Learn to read, write, and speak everyday Japanese with manga stories! If you enjoy manga, you'll love learning Japanese with this book. The language lessons are interspersed with entertaining manga comic strips, making it easy to learn and remember all the key vocabulary and grammar. With a focus on the casual speech used by young people in Japan, you'll find yourself feeling confident with speaking, reading, and writing Japanese quickly! Designed for self-study use by adult learners, this book is a fun resource for beginners--no prior knowledge of Japanese required! Readers will find: Help with learning to write and pronounce the 92 Hiragana and Katakana letters plus 160 basic Kanji characters Hundreds of useful words and phrases--from numbers and greetings to expletives and insults! Seven manga stories woven throughout the book, reinforcing your grasp of the language The basic vocabulary and grammar needed to communicate in Japanese! Hundreds of exercises with free online audio recordings by Japanese native speakers A bidirectional dictionary and answer keys for all the exercises **Recommended for language learners 16 year old & up. Not intended for high school classroom use due to adult content.**

Learn the basics of the Farsi Language quickly! Reading & Writing Farsi is a self-study guide to the Farsi alphabet for anyone who is just getting started in learning this beautiful language. Author Pegah Vil has helped thousands of English-speaking students to learn Farsi and she developed these easy lessons and exercises to help you quickly get up to speed with the basics. The lessons start by showing you how to write the 32 letters of the Farsi alphabet and how to pronounce them correctly (with the aid of native-speaker audio recordings, available online at no cost). From there, you quickly progress to full words and sentences. Extensive exercises and drills at every stage of the process help to reinforce what you have learned. This complete beginning-level language course includes: Memorable pictures to help you remember the Farsi letters by associating their shapes and sounds with familiar images A description of common errors made by English-speaking learners and how to avoid them Access to free, printable flash cards and online native-speaker audio recordings A comprehensive bidirectional dictionary of key terms and phrases with English-Farsi and Farsi-English sections Farsi is spoken by over 110 million people and has a rich poetic tradition. By using this carefully designed book, learners can quickly acquire a basic understanding of written Persian/Farsi--the national language of Iran.

Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing - the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects, spaces and landscapes, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. Authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.

Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese uses a corpus-based, multi-dimensional model to account for variation in written Chinese. Using statistical method and two-dimensional visual representation, it provides a concrete and objective view of the internal variation in written Chinese. This book is a timely work that addresses the growing interest in quantitative genre analysis and how knowledge thus gained can contribute to the teaching as well as understanding of the Chinese language. Zheng-sheng Zhang is Professor of Chinese at San Diego State University. He has been a long-term editor of the Journal of Chinese Language teachers Association (now known as Chinese as a Second Language) and is a respected researcher in the field of Chinese linguistics.

"A valuable reference."
-- "Religious Studies Review"

Jesus never wrote a book. The main sources about him, the Four Gospels, were written some forty years after his death, and contentious debates reign concerning their sometimes contradictory portrayals, which accounts are credible, and how far their authors may have altered or invented episodes to support a view or doctrine of the early Church.

Most scholars assume that information about Jesus was preserved only orally up until the writing of the Gospels, allowing ample time for the stories of Jesus to grow and diversify. Alan Millard here argues that written reports about Jesus could have been made during his lifetime and that some among his audiences and followers may very well have kept notes, first-hand documents that the Evangelists could weave into their narratives.

Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus first provides a brief, fascinating introduction to the history of writing's early survival, how we have the documents we have, and what they can tell us about the times and places of their origins. This overview is followed by a more specific look at what biblical and religious writings survive, how they are dated, and who was able to read and write at the time of their creation. Finally, Millard examines the possibility that Jesus' words and actions were committed to writing during his lifetime and what this would mean for the study of Christianity and the origins of the Gospels.

The Last Language on Earth is an ethnographic history of the disputed Eskayan language, spoken today by an isolated upland community living on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. After Eskaya people were first 'discovered' in 1980, visitors described the group as a lost tribe preserving a unique language and writing system. Others argued that the Eskaya were merely members of a utopian rural cult who had invented their own language and script. Rather than adjudicating outsider polemics, this book engages directly with the language itself as well as the direct perspectives of those who use it today. Through written and oral accounts, Eskaya people have represented their language as an ancestral creation derived from a human body. Reinforcing this traditional view, Piers Kelly's linguistic analysis shows how a complex new register was brought into being by fusing new vocabulary onto a modified local grammar. In a synthesis of linguistic, ethnographic, and historical evidence, a picture emerges of a coastal community that fled the ravages of the U.S. invasion of the island in 1901 in order to build a utopian society in the hills. Here they predicted that the world's languages would decline leaving Eskayan as the last language on earth. Marshalling anthropological theories of nationalism, authenticity, and language ideology, along with comparisons to similar events across highland Southeast Asia, Kelly offers a convincing account of this linguistic mystery and also shows its broader relevance to linguistic anthropology. Although the Eskayan situation is unusual, it has the power to illuminate the pivotal role that language plays in the pursuit of identity-building and political resistance.

The chapters in this edited volume explore the sociolinguistic implications of orthographic and scriptural practices in a diverse range of communicative contexts, ranging from schoolrooms to internet discussion boards. The focus is on the way that scriptural practices both index and constitute social hierarchies, identities and relationships and in some cases, become the focus for public language ideological debates. Capitalizing on the now robust body of literature on orthographic choice and debate in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics, the volume addresses a number of cross-cutting themes that connect orthographic practices to areas of contemporary interest in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. These themes include: the different social implications of self vs. other representation and the permeability of the personal/social and the public/private; how scriptural practices ("inscription") serve as sites for social discipline; the historical and intertextual frameworks for the meaning potentials of orthographic choice (relating to issues of genre and style); and writing as a broader semiotic field: the visual and esthetic dimensions of texts and metalinguistic "play" in spelling and its ambiguous implications for writer stance.

Grapholinguistics, the multifaceted study of writing systems, is growing increasingly popular, yet to date no coherent account covering and connecting its major branches exists. This book now gives an overview of the core theoretical and empirical questions of this field. A treatment of the structure of writing systems-their relation to speech and language, their material features, linguistic functions, and norms, as well as the different types in which they come-is complemented by perspectives centring on the use of writing, incorporating psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic issues such as reading processes or orthographic variation as social action. Examples stem from a variety of diverse systems such as Chinese, English, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, German, and Korean, which allows defining concepts in a broadly applicable way and thereby constructing a comparative grapholinguistic framework that provides readers with important tools for studying any writing system. The book emphasizes that grapholinguistics is a discipline in its own right, inviting discussion and further research in this up-and-coming field as well as an overdue integration of writing into general linguistic discussion.

This volume presents 12 papers on a new approach to the analysis of writing systems. For the first time, quantitative methods are introduced into this area of research in a systematic way. The individual contributions give an overview about quantitative properties of symbols and of writing systems, introduce methods of analysis, study individual writing systems as used for different languages, set up an explanatory model of phenomena connected to script development/evolution, and give a perspective to a general theory of writing systems.

A Grammar of Eton is the first description of the Cameroonian Bantu language Eton. It is also one of the few complete descriptions of a North-western Bantu language. The complex tonology of Eton is carefully analysed and presented in a simple and consistent descriptive framework, which permits the reader to keep track of Eton's many tonal morphemes. Phonologists will be especially interested in the analysis of stem initial prominence, which manifests itself in a number of logically independent phenomena, including length of the onset consonant, phonotactic skewing and number of tonal attachment sites. Typologists and Africanists working on morphosyntax will find useful analyses of, among others, gender and agreement; tense, aspect, mood and negation; and verbal derivation. They will encounter many morphosyntactic differences between Eton and the better known Eastern and Southern Bantu languages, often due to evolutions shaped by maximality constraints on stems. The chapters on clause structure and complex constructions provide data hardly found in sources on the languages of the region, including descriptions of non-verbal clauses, focus, quasi-auxiliaries and adverbial clauses.

Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where "fronting" may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical observations and theoretical implementations. While individual phenomena have been described in some detail, we are currently far from a complete understanding of the uniformity and variation underlying the wider cross-linguistic picture. This volume takes steps towards this goal by showcasing the state of the art in research on predicate fronting and the parameters governing its realization in a range of diverse languages. Covering topics like prosody, VP-fronting, and predicate doubling across a wide arrange of languages, including English, German, Malagasy, Niuean, Ch'ol, Asante, Twi, Limbum, Krachi, Hebrew, and multiple sign languages, this collection enriches our understanding of the predicate fronting phenomenon.

This book sheds new light on the work of Jean-François Champollion by uncovering a constellation of epistemological, political, and material conditions that made his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible. Champollion’s success in understanding hieroglyphs, first published in his Lettre à M. Dacier in 1822, is emblematic for the triumphant achievements of comparative philology during the 19th Century. In its attempt to understand humanity as part of a grand history of progress, Champollion’s conception of ancient Egypt belongs to the universalistic aspirations of European modernity. Yet precisely because of its success, his project also reveals the costs it entailed: after examining and welcoming acquisitions for the emerging Egyptian collections in Europe, Champollion travelled to the Nile Valley in 1828/29, where he was shocked by the damage that had been done to its ancient cultural sites. The letter he wrote to the Egyptian viceroy Mehmet Ali Pasha in 1829 demands that excavations in Egypt be regulated, denounces European looting, and represents perhaps the first document to make a case for the international protection of cultural goods in the name of humanity.

This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

The first object created by God, according to early Muslim commentators, was the pen, which he used to chronicle events to come. The word, in its various manifestations, is central to the Islamic faith. Surely a reflection of this centrality, profuse inscriptions mark countless Islamic objects, from the humblest oil lamps and unglazed ceramics to the finest and most expensive rock crystals and jades. The inscriptions serve numerous functions: decorating, proclaiming ownership and patronage, proffering good wishes and proverbs, and spreading religious texts throughout the world. Aside from their aesthetic worth, these inscriptions provide a fascinating window onto a distant culture.

In Islamic Inscriptions, Sheila S. Blair a wealth of stunning images and incisive commentary, while also providing the newcomer to Islamic civilization with a key to unlocking the mysteries of Islamic epigraphy. In addition to chapters devoted to the main types of inscription, detailing the development of their content and style, inscriptive techniques, and the motivations behind them, the book provides practical knowledge on finding, identifying, interpreting, researching, and recording inscriptions. The variety and clarity of information presented makes Islamic Inscriptions an ideal reference for historians, curators, archaeologists, and collectors.

This book brings together theoretical and practical debates from adult literacy and language education with those of creative writing and community publishing work. Illustrated by accounts of first-hand experience, each chapter focuses on the practical business of achieving good learning and development opportunities for women and men of all ages. Whether working with refugees seeking confidence in spoken English, elderly people reflecting on life experience, or basic education students wishing to 'improve' their literacy, the principle with which the writers are engaged is that of democracy - a process which has lessons both uncomfortable and exciting for educators, as well as for learners. In direct opposition to current imperatives to standardisation and 'standards', the writers in this book argue for the effectiveness of deeper and more generous approaches to literacy and language: approaches which are at the heart of the community publishing movement in the UK. As Judy Wallis puts it: I am not arguing that the teaching of formal skills should be abandoned. Adult Basic Education students know better than anyone that it is important to spell correctly and to write in Standard English because people will discriminate against those who can't... The issue is not whether students need to acquire formal writing skills, but how they can acquire them most successfully.

Boost your language skills with this exciting and new workbook for Intermediate Japanese! This companion workbook to Intermediate Japanese is the perfect guide for practicing conversational Japanese and written Japanese. Following in the footsteps of Tuttle's successful Beginning Japanese Workbook, this book is designed to complete the requirements for the Advanced Placement (AP) Japanese exam. It is suitable for self-study as well as classroom use and has accompanying audio resources designed to improve the reader's pronunciation and listening skills. Intermediate Japanese Workbook includes: Dialogues for contextual learning and practice Translation exercises to reinforce Japanese characters (Kanji and Hiragana) Reading comprehension exercises, questions, and prompts Extensive vocabulary and grammar, games and activities to reinforce learning 125 new Kanji (a cumulative total of 300 with the Beginning Japanese Workbook). Developed by Japanese language experts and experienced high-school Japanese teachers, it includes practice activities for reading, writing, speaking, listening and understanding Japanese. The activities are varied and interesting, mirroring the textbook, and they help you polish every aspect of your Japanese language skills. Written activities center around practicing writing kanji, hiragana, and katakana in the context of the textbook. Whether you're learning Japanese for fun, preparing for a Japanese proficiency exam, want to achieve AP or IB level competency, or just want to get an A in Japanese class, the Intermediate Japanese series is your key to becoming a confident Japanese-speaker. All exercises are designed to be used along with the Intermediate Japanese textbook but can also be used independently to supplement any other Japanese language textbook. The content is carefully aligned with ACTFL National Standards, making this a valuable and practical resource for any learner.

"The most accessible and informative book available on the major writing systems of the world."--"History Today"
Without writing, there would be no history and no civilization as we know it. But how, when, and where did writing evolve?
Andrew Robinson explains the interconnection between sound, symbol, and script in a succinct and absorbing text. He discusses each of the major writing systems in turn, from cuneiform and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs to alphabets and the scripts of China and Japan, as well as topics such as the Cherokee "alphabet" and the writing of runes. Full coverage is given to the history of decipherment, and a provocative chapter devoted to undeciphered scripts challenges the reader: can these codes ever be broken?
In this revised edition, the author reveals the latest discoveries to have an impact on our knowledge of the history of writing, including the Tabula Cortonensis showing Etruscan symbols and a third millennium BC seal from Turkmenistan that could solve the mystery of how Chinese writing evolved. He also discusses how the digital revolution has not, despite gloomy predictions, spelled doom for the printed book. In addition, the table of Maya glyphs has been revised so that they are up-to-date with current research. 355+ illustrations, 50 in color.