The Other Language

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.

"Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics... he argues in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world." Observer *Does language reflect the culture of a society? *Is our mother-tongue a lens through which we perceive the world? *Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? In Through the Language Glass, acclaimed author Guy Deutscher will convince you that, contrary to the fashionable academic consensus of today, the answer to all these questions is - yes. A delightful amalgam of cultural history and popular science, this book explores some of the most fascinating and controversial questions about language, culture and the human mind.

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.

Shakespeare’s last plays, the tragicomic Romances, are notoriously strange plays, riddled with fabulous events and incredible coincidences, magic and dream. These features have sometimes been interpreted as the carelessness of an of an aging dramatist weary of his craft, or justified as folklore motifs, suitable to the romance tale. But neither view explains the fascination and power these plays still exert. Originally published in 1987, Ruth Nevo’s book offers a reading of the plays which invokes the findings and methods of post-psychoanalytic semiotics. Drawing on a Lacanian model of the "textual unconscious", she embarks on searching analyses of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, brilliantly illuminating their apparent absurdities and anomalies, their bizarre or preposterous events and obscurely motivated actions, their often puzzling syntax. Her investigation of the plays’ informing fantasies produces unified and enriched readings which serve both to rehabilitate those plays which have been less than highly thought of, and to disclose new significance in the acknowledged masterpieces.

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.

Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages -- Teutonic, Romance, Greek -- helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a language as it is actually used in everyday life.

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.

Throughout the ages, the Maltese language has undergone a series of internal changes as well as modifications and accretions caused by various external forces. Internal changes are not easy to date and explain because they require a painstaking comparative exercise that can be carried out only by experts in Semitic languages. As a result, their systematic description in a historical grammar of Maltese has not yet been published. By contrast, the external history of Maltese is essentially an account of its contact with various languages. All languages are marked by contact, albeit to varying degrees. Gumperz holds that "most words in most modern languages would count as borrowed" (1982: 67), but what makes Maltese unique is that it blends together elements from three distinct language families: the Semitic, the Romance, and the Germanic. The language spoken in Malta today is the result of a process that has been going on for a thousand years and, consequently, the account presented in this book will show how social, political, and cultural events are reflected in the changing face of the language. As the lexicon is the most tangible aspect of a language, it will naturally be privileged in this account. Thanks to its position exactly at the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, 90 km from Sicily and 290 km from the Tunisian coast, Malta's relations have not been limited to its immediate neighbours, Sicily and North Africa. Since time immemorial, Malta has been at the mercy of all the great naval powers that sailed the Sicilian channel. As a result, the Maltese language has been shaped by its inhabitants' interactions with all the peoples who, throughout the centuries, have landed on the islands to govern it or establish colonies there. In a territory as small as 27 km by 14 km, the ratio between the numbers of the rulers and the ruled is highly significant. For thousands of years, when the inhabitants had to live off the islands' resources, the size of the population must have been consistently small, around 5,000 in all; this factor may have allowed the language to be substituted a number of times. This may surprise us today, but before the Romantic Age, people had a very pragmatic view of language. Like any other tool, language was prized mostly for its efficiency. The population of the Maltese islands has multiplied in the past one thousand years, rising to around 400,000, and such a rapid increase in such a small place could not fail to exert a strong influence on the linguistic scenario. The increase in population was due not only to natural growth but also to cumulative waves of settlers from abroad. Social interaction between the locals and the visitors was strong, bilingual communication took place in various domains at all social levels and relations were especially strong when mixed marriages took place. For this reason, a history of the Maltese language must be seen in the wider context of a linguistic history of the Maltese islands, and will offer linguists belonging to both the historical and typological fields an intriguing case study of what can be considered a "minor" language from the international point of view (used only in a small state, but spoken by the great majority of the islanders) which has managed to survive alongside a series of "major" languages such as Arabic, Latin, Sicilian, Italian, and English, languages which were widely spoken and written abroad and which also enjoyed prestige in Malta itself, but whose local circulation was generally limited to the literate minority.