Language History

“A fascinating look at how we talk about women. . . . Dense with information and anecdotes, Mother Tongue touches on the hilarious and the devastating, with ample dashes of an ingredient so painfully absent from most discussions of sex and gender: humor.” ―Lisa Selin Davis, The Washington...

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...

Have you ever seen a Shakespeare play and come away without fully understanding it? Or wished you had known the basis of the plot before seeing a play by Shakespeare? Are you studying Shakespeare? Would you like to increase your knowledge of the plays without reading the originals? Then these are the recordings for you!

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?

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...

The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control.

Fifty thousand years ago - merely a blip in evolutionary time - our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led to its survival while the rest became extinct. Just what was it that allowed Homo sapiens to become masters of the planet? Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us deep into the fossil record to uncover what made humans so special.

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...

This global history as the Chinese would write it gives brilliant and unconventional insights for understanding China's role in the world, especially the drive to "Make China Great Again." We in the West routinely ask: "What does China want?" The answer is quite simple: the superpower status it...

For months, INSET has been investigating a local terrorist cell that is planning an attack on New Year's Day. INSET had an informant, Mohsin Dar, undercover inside the cell. But now, just weeks before the attack, Mohsin has been murdered at the group's training camp deep in the woods. INSET wants Khattak to give the appearance of investigating Mohsin's death and then to bury the lead. They can't risk exposing their operation or Mohsin's role in it.

"With easygoing authority... [Fridland] offers context, and a welcoming spirit, to the many contentious realignments in our language."—The Wall Street Journal “Smart and funny—I loved it!" —Mignon Fogarty, author of New York Times bestseller Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for...

For more than twenty-five years, small-talk expert Don Gabor has helped thousands of people communicate with wit, confidence, and enthusiasm with his bestseller How to Start a Conversation and Make Friends. This newly revised and updated edition combines classic techniques in the art of...

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the "existing being." In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even "the pretenses of psychology." Nonetheless, it was the source of all these subjects. The branch of philosophy to which Kierkegaard gave birth has come to be known as existentialism.

On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle - an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick.

The Real-World Blueprint to Critical Thinking, Logic & Decision Making is the guide you need. Backed by cognitive science and grounded in real-life examples, this hands-on workbook helps you outthink bias, avoid manipulation, and make better choices in every area of life.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE An “elegantly argued and exuberantly narrated” (The New York Times Book Review) look at the building of social movements—from the 1600s to the present—and how current technology is undermining them “A bravura work...

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century, and when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and codirector of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York.

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.

In a radical new story about the birth of our species, The Origin of Language argues that it was not hunting, fighting, or tool-making that forced early humans to speak, but the inescapable need to care for our children. Journeying to the dawn of Homo sapiens, evolutionary biologist Madeleine...

An urgent, globe-spanning exploration of languages at risk, from Kichwa to Ukrainian, that asks: What do we lose—culturally, politically, and personally—when a language is silenced? Languages can be killed in many ways: war, the climate crisis, nationalism, and even quiet choices made at the...