Hailed by The New York Times as “a natural-born storyteller,” the acclaimed author of Rules of the Wild gives us nine incandescently smart stories, funny, elegant, and poignant by turns, that explore the power of change—in relationships, in geographies, and across cultures—to reveal unexpected aspects of ourselves. Taking us to Venice during film festival season, where a woman buys a Chanel dress she can barely afford; to a sun-drenched Greek village at the height of the summer holidays, where a teenager encounters the shocks of first love; and to a classical dance community in southern India, where a couple gives in to the urge to wander, these remarkable tales bring to life characters stepping outside their boundaries into new passions and destinies. Enlivened by Francesca Marciano’s wit, clear eye, and stunning evocations of people and places, The Other Language is an enthralling tour de force rich with many pleasures. This ebook edition includes a READING GROUP GUIDE.

A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

KAT LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.

This book is for advanced learners of a second language such as translators, interpreters, teachers, the parents of bilingual children, journalists, international business people, heritage speakers and other language lovers. It contains practical strategies, tips and resources related to maintaining a foreign language. It targets those who are already fluent in a second (or third) language and who are looking for ways to maintain their skills long-term. This book will help advanced foreign language speakers find their path to continued language fluency and linguistic success. It provides innovative approaches to self-study, the benefits of singing even if you can't carry a tune, the role of technology in language maintenance and retention, how to play word and other games, and much more. It also provides links and references to many helpful language-related resources. If you love languages, this book is for you!

A mesmerizing novel of love and nostalgia set in the vast spaces of contemporary East Africa. Romantic, often resonantly ironic, moving and wise, Rules of the Wild transports us to a landscape of unsurpassed beauty even as it gives us a sharp-eyed portrait of a closely knit tribe of cultural outsiders: the expatriates living in Kenya today. Challenged by race, by class, and by a longing for home, here are "safari boys" and samaritans, reporters bent on their own fame, travelers who care deeply about elephants but not at all about the people of Africa. They all know each other. They meet at dinner parties, they sleep with each other, they argue about politics and the best way to negotiate their existence in a place where they don't really belong. At the center is Esmé, a beautiful young woman of dazzling ironies and introspections, who tells us her story in a voice both passionate and self-deprecating. Against a paradoxical backdrop of limitless physical freedom and escalating civil unrest, Esmé struggles to make sense of her own place in Africa and of her feelings for the two men there whom she loves--Adam, a second-generation Kenyan who is the first to show her the wonders of her adopted land, and Hunter, a British journalist sickened by its horrors. Rules of the Wild evokes the worlds of Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, and Ernest Hemingway. It explores unforgettably our infinite desire for a perfect elsewhere, for love and a place to call home. It is an astonishing literary debut.

Every statement about language is also a statement by and about psyche. Guided by this primary assumption, and inspired by the works of Carl Jung, in Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language, Bret Alderman delves deep into the symbolic and symptomatic dimensions of a deconstructive postmodernism infatuated with semiotics and the workings of linguistic signs. This book offers an important exploration of linguistic reference and representation through a Jungian understanding of symptom and symbol, using techniques including amplification, dream interpretation, and symbolic attitude. Focusing on Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty, Alderman examines the common belief that words and their meaning are grounded purely in language, instead envisioning a symptomatic expression of alienation and collective dissociation. Drawing upon the nascent field of ecopsychology, the modern disciplines of phenomenology and depth psychology, and the ancient knowledge of myth and animistic cosmologies, Alderman dares us to re-imagine some of the more sacrosanct concepts of the contemporary intellectual milieu informed by semiotics and the linguistic turn. Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of depth psychology. However, the interdisciplinary approach of the work ensures that it will also be of great interest to those researching and studying in the areas of ethology, ecopsychology, philosophy, linguistics and mythology.

First published in 1990. Our philosophy is grounded in only half a language, in which the power of discourse is deployed and the strength of listening ignored. We are inhabitants of a culture that knows how to speak but not how to listen, so we constantly mistake warring monologues for genuine dialogue. In this remarkable book, Gemma Corradi Fiumara seeks to redress that balance by examining the other side of language - listening. Synthesising the insights of Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Gadamer, among many others, she puts forward a powerful argument for the replacement of the `silent' silence of traditional Western thought with the rich openness of an authentic listening.