English Language History

Scattered over the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea lie the remnants of failed peace proposals, international summits, secret negotiations, UN resolutions, and state-building efforts. The conventional story is that these well-meaning attempts at peacemaking were repeatedly, perhaps terminally, thwarted by violence. Through a rich interweaving of reportage, historical narrative, and powerful analysis, Nathan Thrall presents a startling counterhistory.

Why did once-stone-faced animals evolve to be so emotionally expressive—to be us? The answer, as evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi and mathematician Tim Barber reveal, is that emotional expressions are our first and most important language—one that allows us, as social animals, to engage in highly sophisticated communications and negotiations.

Get ready for a one-of-a-kind audio experience: discover Rome through intimate, guided audio walking tours of the city's most historic and enchanting quarters. There are four guided tours for you to listen to as you walk through Rome, plus essential Italian words and phrases that every traveler wants to know.

The practice and politics of the unfettered female voice--reclaiming your power through voice, song, and opera-inspired exercises. For centuries, opera has used women’s voices to convey male stories. Within an art form dominated by men, the female voice is a means to an end: controlled...

For the last 150 years, both popular and academic views have asserted that Jesus spoke Aramaic as his primary language of communication since supposedly Hebrew died out after the children of Israel were taken into Babylonian captivity. This view, however, is not based on the testimony of the Old Testament, the New Testament, historical sources, or Jesus' actual words. Just which language did Jesus and his disciples speak?

A celebration of Ms.—the most startling, most audacious, most norm-breaking of the magazine's groundbreaking pieces on women, men, politics (sexual and otherwise), marriage, family, education, work, motherhood, and reproductive rights, as well as the best of the magazine’s fiction, poetry...

The French point of view: “La langue anglaise n’existe pas. C’est du français mal prononcé.” (“The English language doesn’t exist. It is badly pronounced French.”) Georges Clemenceau, French Prime Minister, 1917-1920.

More than a quarter of a century ago, Leo Rosten published the first comprehensive and hilariously entertaining lexicon of the colorful and deeply expressive language of Yiddish. Said “to give body and soul to the Yiddish language,” The Joys of Yiddish went on to become an indispensable tool...

Idioms and expressions are a part of everyday English, but they aren't always the easiest to figure out. Many of these phrases have meanings that aren't immediately clear, and it can be confusing when they come up in conversations.

Whether it's the distress of a bad haircut (AGE-OTORI) or longing for the food someone else is eating (GROAKING), the pleasure found in other people's happiness (CONFELICITY) or the shock of jumping into icy water (CURGLAFF), there are real words to pinpoint exactly how you feel and Susie Dent, Queen of Countdown's Dictionary Corner and lexicographer extraordinaire, is going to help you find them. Here are 1001 terms everyone needs, whether it's the best kind of hug (CWTCH), the relief found in swearing (LALOCHEZIA), or the ability to endure till the end (PERTOLERANCE).

Remember the name - but can't remember the face? Remember the face - but can't remember the name? Harry Lorayne's easy-to-use techniques will teach you how! How important is recalling a name or face? No matter how briefly you may have met, remembering someone can be a crucial social and business...

One of the twentieth century's most influential books, this classic work of anthropology offers a groundbreaking exploration of what culture is With The Interpretation of Cultures, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the concept of thick description, and in so doing, he...

What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to...

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. His ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms than a system, it is brilliant, persuasive, and incisive. His major concept is the will to power, which he saw as the basic impulse for all our acts. Christianity he saw as a subtle perversion of this concept, thus Nietzsche's famous pronouncement, "God is dead."

A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography. Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (†)—which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible—or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and everyday (&).

With his trademark humor and flair, bestselling linguist John McWhorter busts the myths and shares the history of the most controversial language topic of our times: pronouns The nature of language is to shift and evolve—but every so often, a new usage creates a whole lot of consternation...

Frances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites readers back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food, there and throughout Italy. Having spent her summers in Tuscany for the past...

This audiobook will show that the fundamentals, structure, formations, grammar, and syntax are exactly the same in music and in the Egyptian alphabetical language. The audiobook will show the musical/tonal/tonic Egyptian alphabets - being derived from the three primary tonal sounds/vowels; the fundamentals of generative phonology; and the nature of the four-sound variation of each letter and its exact equivalence in musical notes.

In our ever-more-polarized society, there's at least one thing we still agree on: The world is overrun with misinformation, faulty logic, and the gullible followers who buy into it all. Of course, we're not among them - are we? Scientist David Robert Grimes is on a mission to expose the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that drive our discourse on a dizzying array of topics - from vaccination to abortion, 9/11 conspiracy theories to dictatorial doublespeak, astrology to alternative medicine, and wrongful convictions to racism.

Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people 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.