Babel - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Babel write by Gaston Dorren. This book was released on 2018-12-04. Babel available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. “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)
Linguistics for Everyone
Linguistics for Everyone - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Linguistics for Everyone write by Kristin E. Denham. This book was released on 2013. Linguistics for Everyone available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. LINGUISTICS FOR EVERYONE, 2E, International Edition connects the study of linguistics to the language you use every day. The text is very user-friendly: casual writing style, logical presentation of material, balance of theoretical and practical, entertaining information, and lots of ideas and activities to put what you learn to use right away. The first chapter gives you the basics such as how to define language, new ways to look at grammar, your innate knowledge about language. Later chapters address core linguistics areas in depth (phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics). Many innovative and varied activities help you review and practice the content and apply the knowledge immediately. Special features throughout the book demystify common curiosities about how language works.
An Introduction to Language and Linguistics
An Introduction to Language and Linguistics - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook An Introduction to Language and Linguistics write by Ralph Fasold. This book was released on 2006-03-09. An Introduction to Language and Linguistics available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This accessible textbook offers balanced and uniformly excellent coverage of modern linguistics.
Probabilistic Linguistics
Probabilistic Linguistics - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Probabilistic Linguistics write by Rens Bod. This book was released on 2003-04-08. Probabilistic Linguistics available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.
The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics
The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics write by Michael T. Putnam. This book was released on 2020-04-16. The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The first comprehensive overview of the structure of modern Germanic languages. Written by a team of internationally-renowned experts, it is a vital resource for students and researchers investigating the Germanic family of languages and dialects, covering key topics such as phonology, morphology, syntax, heritage and minority languages.
