C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words explores this fascination by taking a series of words and teasing out their connotations using examples from a vast range of English literature, recovering lost meanings and analysing their functions. It doubles as an absorbing and entertaining study of verbal communication, its pleasures and problems. The issues revealed are essential to all who read and communicate thoughtfully, and are handled here by a masterful exponent and analyst of the English language.

    How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim.

    Marcel Detienne's starting point is a simple observation: In archaic Greece, three figures -- the diviner, the bard, and the king -- all share the privilege of dispensing truth by virtue of the religious power of divine memory, which provides them with knowledge, both oracular and inspired, of the present, past, and future. Beginning with this definition of the prerational meaning of truth, Detienne proceeds to elaborate the complex conceptual and historical contexts from which emerges the philosophical notion of truth still influencing Western philosophy today.

    This new edition includes 200 new words and 850 new citations with 300 new pages.

    

    But since that long, long ago time, Hebrew has grown mightily, to become one of the great modern languages of the world. The story of its growth from a mere handful of words to its present rich estate is colorful and dramatic. It has never been told before. In this book, the story of the growth of the Hebrew language is written with clarity. charm and distinction.

    Appropriate for third- and fourth-semester college classes, the main textbook of the Third Edition contains sixteen chapters, each covering a specific grammar topic. Most of these chapters are sub-divided into levels, beginning with the most basic principles, then proceeding to more advanced material. Each level concludes with a series of exercises, usually moving from strictly controlled exercises on a single aspect of the topic, to combination exercises (Mixed Exercises), and finally to English-to-German translation activities (Express in German). A new Student Manual, closely tied to the main text, provides a greater variety of activities that allow students to use the targeted structures in meaningful situations and contexts. The Student Manual is intended for in-class use, although students can also do the activities at home.

    The general approach in writing this text is the same as that in Beginning Chinese Reader.  It is discussed in some detail in the introduction to that work.  Salient features include:1) Selection of characters on the basis of frequency;2) Provision of a large number of compounds and a large amount of reading matter relative to the number of characters;3) Inclusion of dialogue material in order to provide students with audiolingual support of what they read;4) Close correlation with Beginning Chinese, Advanced Chinese, and the character versions of these two texts.The present volume contains 400 characters, some 2,500 compounds, and about 200,000 characters of running text.

    Office of Education. Yale Linguistic Series.Mr. DeFrancis, research professor of Chinese at Seton Hall University, is visiting professor of Chinese at the University of Hawaii.

    

    

    Book by hirsch, eric

    Pike offers an integrated theory about how our understanding of language could serve as a basis for the understanding of culture.