Washoe County Library System

"Everyone likes to think they know a bit about language: There are some words that you simply can't translate into English. The origin of a word tells you how it should be used. A dialect is inferior to a language. The problem is, none of these statements are true. In Don't Believe a Word, linguist David Shariatmadari explodes nine common myths about language and introduces us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics. By the end of...

A tour of the world's twenty most-spoken languages explores the history, geography, linguistics, and cultures that have been shaped by languages and their customs. English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He sets out...

"Think about the game charades. Its rules are simple: no talking, of course, and little else. Each time we play with a new group, we have to figure each other out, with our different styles, backgrounds, and senses of the world, as we struggle to connect how we would act out something (say, Christopher Columbus crossing the Atlantic) with how other people might understand it. But as we play, a lingo can develop-with time, an upheld hand, bobbing along,...

"100 wonder-filled word puzzles that thrill and tantalize with the beauty, magic, and weirdness of world language"--

"Some languages have many millions of speakers. Others may have fewer than ten. But all of these languages do the same thing: They allow us to communicate with each other. With language, we can greet each other, share ideas, ask questions, tell jokes, argue and make up. But where do languages come from? And where are they spoken? The Book of Languages dips into 21 of the world’s most commonly spoken languages to start you off on an exciting linguistic...

Selig, who loves words and copies them on pieces of paper that he carries with him, goes on a trip to discover his purpose.

"A guide to how languages around the world differ from one another far more than we realize and point to fundamental differences in how people conceive of everything from time to color to smell"-- "A sweeping exploration of the relationship between the language we speak and our perception of such fundamentals of experience as time, space, color, and smells. We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our...

Tom Wolfe takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. THE KINGDOM OF SPEECH is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech--not evolution--is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies...