A Taste For Language

A Taste of Languages, stories of French and English is a book written in both English and French - you choose your language! Take a 2000-year express journey to discover some of the stories which have made these two languages so closely linked. Why do English speakers pronounce satisfaction SATISFACSHON? Do you know that the motto of the Royal Family of England is Dieu et mon droit...? Yes, Dieu et mon droit, in French! And why is the weekend in France called le week-end? All the answers and more are in this little book with beautiful original illustrations. A book for language lovers, teachers and curious little linguists, to be read on your own, en famille or with your students! Le goût des langues, petites histoires de l'anglais et du français est un livre écrit en anglais et en français choisissez votre langue ! Faites un voyage express de 2000 ans pour découvrir quelques-unes des histoires qui expliquent les liens intimes entre ces deux langues. Pourquoi les anglophones prononcent Satisfaction SATISFACSHON ? Savez-vous que la devise de la famille royale d’Angleterre est: Dieu et mon droit… ? Oui, Dieu et mon droit, en français ! Et pourquoi utilise-t-on le week-end en français ainsi que d’autres mots anglais ? Toutes les réponses et bien plus encore se trouvent dans ce petit livre aux belles illustrations originales. Un livre pour les amoureux des langues, les enseignants et les petits linguistes curieux, à lire seul, en famille ou avec vos élèves.

“This is a book about the American Dream as it has become embodied in the university in general and in the English department in particular,” writes James Ray Watkins at the start of A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies. In it, Watkins argues that contemporary economic and political challenges require a clear understanding of the identity of English studies, making elementary questions about literacy, language, literature, education, and class once again imperative. A personal history of university-level English studies in the twentieth century, A Taste for Language combines biography, autobiography, and critical analysis to explore the central role of freshman English and literary studies in the creation and maintenance of the middle class. It tells a multi-generational story of the author and his father, intertwined with close reading of texts and historical analysis. The story moves from depression-era Mississippi, where the author's father was born, to a contemporary English department, where the author now teaches. Watkins looks at not only textbooks, scholars, and the academy but also at families and other social institutions. A rich combination of biography, autobiography, and critical analysis, A Taste for Language questions what purpose an education in English language and literature serves in the lives of the educated in a class-based society and whether English studies has become wholly irrelevant in the twenty-first century.

Have you ever been enchanted by the spoken cadence of an Urdu couplet but wished you could fully understand its nuances? Have you wanted to engage with a ghazal more deeply but were daunted by its mystifying conventions? Are you confused between a qataa and a rubaai, or a musadda and a marsiya? In Urdu Poetry, Raza Mir offers a fresh, quirky and accessible entry point for neophytes seeking to enhance their enjoyment of this vibrant canon—from the poems of legends like Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Ghalib to the lyrics of contemporary game changers like Javed Akhtar and Gulzar. Raza Mir’s translation not only draws out the zest and pathos of these timeless verses, but also provides pithy insights and colourful trivia that will enable readers to fully embrace this world.

Never before has there been a book focusing on the theme of tea as it relates to both the fine and decorative arts. Through over 330 beautiful color images and a fascinating and informative text, the book explore the history of tea and its impact on the development of porcelain, furniture, silver, and the other decorative arts. In addition to tea pots, cups and saucers, kettle stands, tea caddies, silver wares, and more, there is a wide selection from the fine arts, from maritime painting, to portraiture and still life, which captures the romance of tea.

Taste is considered one of the lowest sensory modalities, and the most difficult to express in language. Recently, an increasing body of research in perception language and in Food Studies has been sparkling new interest and new perspectives on the importance of this sense. Merging anthropology, evolutionary physiology and philosophy, this book investigates the language of Taste in English, and its relationship with our embodied minds. In the first part of the book, the author explores the semantic dimensions of Taste terms with a usage-based approach. With the application of experimental protocols, Bagli enquires their possible organization in a radial network and calculates the Salience index of gustatory terms in both American and British English. The second part of the book is an overview of the metaphorical extensions that motivate the polysemy of Taste terms, with the aid of corpus analysis methods and various texts. This book is the first to review systematically and in a usage-based perspective the role of the sensory domain of Taste in English, showing a more complicated picture and suggesting that its under-representation and difficulty of encoding does not correspond to lack of importance.

A teenage boy suffering from curvature of the spine begins swimming every week at the local pool, at the repeated request of his chiropractor. In the interior and echoing world of the swimming pool, surrounded by anonymous bodies and in between lengths, he becomes acquainted with a girl who agrees to give him pointers on his technique.The French original won the Essentiel Revelation prize at the Festival d'Angouleme in January 2009. The author was 25 years old at the time."