A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how--and whether--culture shapes language and language, culture. How languages deal with color is given particular emphasis.

"Japanese literary sensation Fuminori Nakamura's latest novel is as a dark look into human psyche-- what turns someone into a killer? Can it be something as small as a suggestion? Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life. A confessional diary implicates its reader in a heinous crime, and reveals with disturbing honesty the psychological motives of a killer. With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed...

Is vocabulary destiny? Why do clocks 'talk' to the Nahua people of Mexico? Will A.I. researchers ever produce true human-machine dialogue? In this mesmerizing collection of essays, Daniel Tammet answers these and many other questions about the intricacy and profound power of language. Tammet goes back in time to explore the numeric language of his autistic childhood; he looks at the music and patterns that words make, and how languages evolve and...

"Silvia Ferrara leads a code cracking mission to decipher the hidden truths and histories of our greatest invention--the art of writing"-- Ferrara takes a profound look at how-- and how many times-- human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language around the world. Readers will examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts; study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions, and venture to the cutting...

"We all had teachers who scolded us over the use of um, uh-huh, oh, like, and mm-hmm. But as linguist N. J. Enfield reveals in How We Talk, these "bad words" are fundamental to language. Whether we are speaking with the clerk at the store, our boss, or our spouse, language is dependent on things as commonplace as a rising tone of voice, an apparently meaningless word, or a glance-signals so small that we hardly pay them any conscious attention. Nevertheless,...

A teenager born with a brain condition that makes it difficult to feel emotions has his world shattered when he loses his devoted mother and grandmother and finds himself in a surprising friendship with the school bully.

"Taking readers on a rollicking ride through history, a master storyteller and reporter, whose legend began in journalism, presents a paradigm-shifting argument that speech, not evolution, is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements"--NoveList.

In this highly entertaining book, language enthusiast and Sunday Times best-selling author Caroline Taggart browses through thousands of years of history to shed light on why we use the words and phrases we do. Arranged by themes including food, the household, childhood, romance and more, this intriguing book looks at the origins of our language from their historical context. For example, did you know that: If you rest on your laurels, you're imitating...

"A bestselling linguist takes us on a lively tour of how the English language is evolving before our eyes and why we should embrace this transformation and not fight it. Language is always changing -- but we tend not to like it. We understand that new words must be created for new things, but the way English is spoken today rubs many of us the wrong way. Whether its the use of literally to mean "figuratively" rather than "by the letter" or the way...