Obsessed With Language

Author : Chantal Bouchard
Publisher : Guernica Editions
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Obsessed with Language written by Chantal Bouchard and published by Guernica Editions. This book was released on 2008 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating study of the French-Canadian dialect, this insightful analysis examines the intimate relationship between Quebec and its heartily defended dialect, from 19th-century Parisian French to the joual of the 1960s.

Author : Allison Britz
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1481489208
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Obsessed written by Allison Britz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brave teen recounts her debilitating struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder—and brings readers through every painful step as she finds her way to the other side—in this powerful and inspiring memoir. Until sophomore year of high school, fifteen-year-old Allison Britz lived a comfortable life in an idyllic town. She was a dedicated student with tons of extracurricular activities, friends, and loving parents at home. But after awakening from a vivid nightmare in which she was diagnosed with brain cancer, she was convinced the dream had been a warning. Allison believed that she must do something to stop the cancer in her dream from becoming a reality. It started with avoiding sidewalk cracks and quickly grew to counting steps as loudly as possible. Over the following weeks, her brain listed more dangers and fixes. She had to avoid hair dryers, calculators, cell phones, computers, anything green, bananas, oatmeal, and most of her own clothing. Unable to act “normal,” the once-popular Allison became an outcast. Her parents questioned her behavior, leading to explosive fights. When notebook paper, pencils, and most schoolbooks were declared dangerous to her health, her GPA imploded, along with her plans for the future. Finally, she allowed herself to ask for help and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. This brave memoir tracks Allison’s descent and ultimately hopeful climb out of the depths.

Author : Martin Puchner
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1324005920
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate written by Martin Puchner and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracking an underground language and the outcasts who depended on it for their survival. Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people who were "wiz" (in the know). This hybrid language, dubbed Rotwelsch, facilitated survival for people in flight—whether escaping persecution or just down on their luck. It was a language of the road associated with vagabonds, travelers, Jews, and thieves that blended words from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Romani, Czech, and other European languages and was rich in expressions for police, jail, or experiencing trouble, such as "being in a pickle." This renegade language unsettled those in power, who responded by trying to stamp it out, none more vehemently than the Nazis. As a boy, Martin Puchner learned this secret language from his father and uncle. Only as an adult did he discover, through a poisonous 1930s tract on Jewish names buried in the archives of Harvard’s Widener Library, that his own grandfather had been a committed Nazi who despised this "language of thieves." Interweaving family memoir with an adventurous foray into the mysteries of language, Puchner crafts an entirely original narrative. In a language born of migration and survival, he discovers a witty and resourceful spirit of tolerance that remains essential in our volatile present.

Author : Rosemary C. Salomone
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190625619
Total Pages : 489 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Rise of English written by Rosemary C. Salomone and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping account of the global rise of English and the high-stakes politics of languageSpoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca- - its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "riseof English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign colleagues. Business interests can flourish in the global economy.But the rise of English has very real downsides as well. In Europe, imperatives of political integration and job mobility compete with pride in national language and heritage. In the United States and England, English isolates us from the cultural and economic benefits of speaking other languages.And in countries like India, South Africa, Morocco, and Rwanda, it has stratified society along lines of English proficiency.In The Rise of English, Rosemary Salomone offers a commanding view of the unprecedented spread of English and the far-reaching effects it has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business. From the inner workings of the European Union to linguistic battles over influence inAfrica, Salomone draws on a wealth of research to tell the complex story of English - and, ultimately, to argue for English not as a force for domination but as a core component of multilingualism and the transcendence of linguistic and cultural borders.

Author : Gabriel Wyner
Publisher : Harmony
ISBN 13 : 038534810X
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fluent Forever written by Gabriel Wyner and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

Author : David Michael Kleinberg-Levin
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438447825
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Redeeming Words written by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this probing look at Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and the stories of W. G. Sebald, Redeeming Words offers a philosophical meditation on the power of language in literature. David Kleinberg-Levin draws on the critical theory of Benjamin and Adorno; the idealism and romanticism of Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling; and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. He shows how Döblin and Sebald—writers with radically different styles working in different historical moments—have in common a struggle against forces of negativity and an aim to bring about in response a certain redemption of language. Kleinberg-Levin considers the fast-paced, staccato, and hard-cut sentences of Döblin and the ghostly, languorous, and melancholy prose fiction of Sebald to articulate how both writers use language in an attempt to recover and convey this utopian promise of happiness for life in a time of mourning.

Author : Tove Skutnabb-Kangas
Publisher : Multilingual Matters Limited
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Minority Education written by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and published by Multilingual Matters Limited. This book was released on 1988 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In both Europe and North America during the past 20 years, controversy has surrounded the education of children from linguistic minority backgrounds. An increasing number of minority children are experiencing difficulties at school and many leave school with no formal qualifications. There are fears among many educators and policy-makers that an entire generation of alienated youth with no future prospects is being produced by western educational systems. This book analyses policy issues regarding the education of minority students in western industrialised societies and presents a number of case studies of programs that have been successful in reversing the pattern of minority students' academic failure. A central theme throughout the volume is that the causes of minority students' academic difficulties are rooted in the power relations between the dominant and subordinate groups in society. Schools have typically reflected and reinforced these power relations through strategies such as punishment of children for speaking their mother tongue at school with the result that minority students have not developed confidence in their own cultural identity or academic abilities. Reversal of minority students' school failure requires that educators set out to enable both minority students and communities to empower themselves. The presentation of case studies in which this empowerment has been successfully achieved is complemented by the perspectives of individuals and minority communities who have been involved in the struggle for educational and linguistic rights of minority children.

Author : David Kleinberg-Levin
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474216889
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beckett's Words written by David Kleinberg-Levin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.

Author : Crispin Sartwell
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791447253
Total Pages : 154 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book End of Story written by Crispin Sartwell and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-11-02 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the academy's obsession with language, and in particular with narrative, has become a sort of disease.

Author : Keith Kahn-Harris
Publisher : Icon Books
ISBN 13 : 1785787381
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Babel Message written by Keith Kahn-Harris and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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 Garfield A thrilling journey deep into the heart of language, from a rather unexpected starting point. Keith Kahn-Harris is a man obsessed with something seemingly trivial - the warning message found inside Kinder Surprise eggs: WARNING, read and keep: Toy not suitable for children under 3 years. Small parts might be swallowed or inhaled. On a tiny sheet of paper, this message is translated into dozens of languages - the world boiled down to a multilingual essence. Inspired by this, the author asks: what makes 'a language'? With the help of the international community of language geeks, he shows us what the message looks like in Ancient Sumerian, Zulu, Cornish, Klingon - and many more. Along the way he considers why Hungarian writing looks angry, how to make up your own language, and the meaning of the heavy metal umlaut. Overturning the Babel myth, he argues that the messy diversity of language shouldn't be a source of conflict, but of collective wonder. This is a book about hope, a love letter to language. 'This is a wonderful book. A treasure trove of mind-expanding insights into language and humanity encased in a deliciously quirky, quixotic quest. I loved it. Warning: this will keep you reading.' - Ann Morgan, author of Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer