Walter John Clark presents 'International Language, Past, Present & Future', a comprehensive exploration of the past, present, and future of international communication. Drawing from historical attempts and existing international languages, the author highlights the rise of Esperanto and its potential to bridge linguistic barriers. With detailed specimens, grammar, and vocabulary, this book offers a practical glimpse into the structure and benefits of Esperanto as a potential universal language.

With color and black-and-white illustrations throughout, Hawaiian Language: Past, Present, Future presents aspects of Hawaiian and its history that are rarely treated in language classes. The major characters in this book make up a diverse cast: Dutch merchants, Captain Cook’s naturalist and philologist William Anderson, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia (the inspiration for the Hawaiian Mission), the American lexicographer Noah Webster, philologists in New England, missionary-linguists and their Hawaiian consultants, and many minor players. The account begins in prehistory, placing the probable origins of the ancestor of Polynesian languages in mainland Asia. An evolving family tree reflects the linguistic changes that took place as these people moved east. The current versions are examined from a Hawaiian-centered point of view, comparing the sound system of the language with those of its major relatives in the Polynesian triangle. More recent historical topics begin with the first written samples of a Polynesian language in 1616, which led to the birth of the idea of a widespread language family. The next topic is how the Hawaiian alphabet was developed. The first efforts suffered from having too many letters, a problem that was solved in 1826 through brilliant reasoning by its framers and their Hawaiian consultants. The opposite problem was that the alphabet didn’t have enough letters: analysts either couldn’t hear or misinterpreted the glottal stop and long vowels. The end product of the development of the alphabet—literacy—is more complicated than some statistics would have us believe. As for its success or failure, both points of view, from contemporary observers, are presented. Still, it cannot be denied that literacy had a tremendous and lasting effect on Hawaiian culture. The last part of the book concentrates on the most-used Hawaiian reference works—dictionaries. It describes current projects that combine print and manuscript collections on a searchable website. These projects can include the growing body of manuscript and print material that is being made available through recent and ongoing research. As for the future, a proposed monolingual dictionary would allow users to avoid an English bridge to understanding, and move directly to a definition that includes Hawaiian cultural features and a Hawaiian worldview.

Reflections on two centuries of economic history from a Nobel Prize winner in the field: “An accessible collection by a renowned economist.”—Library Journal How do economists decide what questions to address and how to choose their theories? How do they tackle the problems of the economic system and give advice on public policy? With these broad questions, Nobel laureate R. H. Coase, widely recognized for his seminal work on transaction costs, reflects on some of the most fundamental concerns of economists over the past two centuries. In fifteen essays, Coase evaluates the contributions of a number of outstanding figures, including Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Arnold Plant, Duncan Black, and George Stigler, as well as economists at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. “Are you looking for a book by an economist who can really write and has insight after insight on free markets vs. government regulation? Would you like it even better if you could get some good laughs from his clever way of putting things? Then Ronald H. Coase’s Essays on Economics and Economists is the book for you.”—Reason

The book examines the diachronic change of time perception throughout Anglo-Saxon England, with the conversion as a turning point. It draws evidence from a variety of sources, in particular from a close reading of Bede’s historical writings and his treatises on time, from Old English poetry, especially The Dream of the Rood, The Phoenix, The Wanderer, Beowulf, The Ruin, Deor, from the literature of the Alfredian period, and from the lexical and statistical analysis of Old English time words. It offers insights into the complexity of time in the Anglo-Saxon context, and shows how the change of time can help to understand the conceptual system of the Anglo-Saxons.

For centuries Latin served as an international language for scholars in Europe. Yet as early as the first half of the seventeenth century, scholars, philosophers, and scientists were beginning to turn their attention to the possibility of formulating a totally new universal language. This wide-ranging book focuses upon the role that it was thought an ideal, universal, constructed language would play in the advancement of learning. The first section examines seventeenth-century attempts to establish a universal 'common writing' or, as Bishop Wilkins called it, a 'real character and philosophical language.' This movement involved or interested scientists and philosophers as distinguished as Descartes, Mersenne, Comenius, Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz. The second part of the book follows the same theme through to the final years of the eighteenth century, where the implications of language-building for the progress of knowledge are presented as part of the wider question which so interested French philosophers, that of the influence of signs on thought. The author also includes a chapter tracing the frequent appearance of ideal languages in French and English imaginary voyages, and an appendix on the idea that gestural signs might supply a universal language. This work is intended as a contribution to the history of ideas rather than of linguistics proper, and because it straddles several disciplines, will interest a wide variety of reader. It treats comprehensively a subject that has not previously been adequately dealt with, and should become the standard work in its field.