Arguing from within the sensibility of devout liberal Hindus who do not believe in exclusive religious nationalism, Juluri argued that these writers had turned their crusade against Hindutva into an egregiously misplaced existential attack on popular Hinduism. Widely read and commented on by lay readers and academics, this important review essay is essential reading for who anyone who cares for both Hinduism and secularism today.

    His profound management sutras are derived from his bestselling books on business and management. They show how individuals can realize their potential, create wealth and achieve lasting success by following uniquely Indian principles (based on Hindu, Jain and Buddhist mythology) of goal setting, strategic thinking and decision-making.

    His previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate, have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society. With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

    There are good reasons that language fascinates us so. It not only defines humans as a species, placing us head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators, but it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries. For example: * How did different languages come to be? * Why isn’t there just a single language? * How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth? * How does a language become extinct? Dr. John McWhorter, one of America’s leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today.An accomplished scholar, Professor McWhorter is also a skilled popularizer, whose book The Power of Babel was called "startling, provocative, and remarkably entertaining," by the San Diego Union-Tribune.The London Times called him "a born teacher." And Steven Pinker, best known as the author of The Language Instinct, offered this praise for the book: "McWhorter’s arguments are sharply reasoned, refreshingly honest, and thoroughly original."Course Lecture Titles1. What Is Language? 2. When Language Began 3. How Language Changes—Sound Change 4. How Language Changes—Building New Material 5. How Language Changes—Meaning and Order 6. How Language Changes—Many Directions 7. How Language Changes—Modern English 8. Language Families—Indo-European 9. Language Families—Tracing Indo-European 10. Language Families—Diversity of Structures 11. Language Families—Clues to the Past 12. The Case Against the World’s First Language 13. The Case For the World’s First Language 14. Dialects—Subspecies of Species 15. Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line? 16. Dialects—Two Tongues in One Mouth 17. Dialects—The Standard as Token of the Past 18. Dialects—Spoken Style, Written Style 19. Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar 20. Language Mixture—Words 21. Language Mixture—Grammar 22. Language Mixture—Language Areas 23. Language Develops Beyond the Call of Duty 24. Language Interrupted 25. A New Perspective on the Story of English 26. Does Culture Drive Language Change? 27. Language Starts Over—Pidgins 28. Language Starts Over—Creoles I 29. Language Starts Over—Creoles II 30. Language Starts Over—Signs of the New 31. Language Starts Over—The Creole Continuum 32. What Is Black English? 33. Language Death—The Problem 34. Language Death—Prognosis 35. Artificial Languages 36. Finale—Master Class

    But linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He shows how the evolution of different language forms—that is, different grammar—reflects how language is influenced by human societies and experiences, and how it expresses their great variety.  For example, the Amazonian Pirahã put words together in ways that violate our long-held under-standing of how language works, and Pirahã grammar expresses complex ideas very differently than English grammar does. Drawing on the Wari’ language of Brazil, Everett explains that speakers of all languages, in constructing their stories, omit things that all members of the culture understand. In addition, Everett discusses how some cultures can get by without words for numbers or counting, without verbs for “to say” or “to give,” illustrating how the very nature of what’s important in a language is culturally determined. Combining anthropology, primatology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and his own pioneering—and adventurous—research with the Amazonian Pirahã, and using insights from many different languages and cultures, Everett gives us an unprecedented elucidation of this society-defined nature of language. In doing so, he also gives us a new understanding of how we think and who we are.

    Featuring two of Chomsky's most popular and enduring books in one omnibus volume, On Language contains some of the noted linguist and political critic's most informal and accessible work to date, making it an ideal introduction to his thought.In Part I, Language and Responsibility (1979), Chomsky presents a fascinating self-portrait of his political, moral, and linguistic thinking through a series of interviews with Mitsou Ronat, the noted French linguist. In Part II, Reflections on Language (1975), Chomsky explores the more general implications of the study of language and offers incisive analyses of the controversies among psychologists, philosophers, and linguists over fundamental questions of language.

    In the last fifty years, we've zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to tablet computers, text messages to tweets. We generate more and more words with each passing day. Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel.In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints.Using innovative analytic techniques, Pennebaker X-rays everything from Craigslist advertisements to the Federalist Papers-or your own writing, in quizzes you can take yourself-to yield unexpected insights. Who would have predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that a world leader's use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he led his country into war? You'll learn why it's bad when politicians use "we" instead of "I," what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge's syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion. Barack Obama, Sylvia Plath, and King Lear are among the figures who make cameo appearances in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying-whether we mean them to or not.

    In this illuminating, in-depth Q & A, “America’s storyteller” lets readers in on his philosophical approach to understanding our nation’s past, as well as a little family secret for overcoming your fears.Tom Roston is a veteran journalist who began his career at The Nation and Vanity Fair magazines, before working at Premiere magazine as a senior editor. He writes a regular blog about nonfiction filmmaking on PBS.org and he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. He lives with his wife and their two daughters in New York City. Cover design by Adil Dara.

    Now this sensational new book strikes back to defend the fascinating, real-life diversity of this most basic human faculty.With the erudite yet accessible style that marks his work as a journalist, Robert Lane Greene takes readers on a rollicking tour around the world, illustrating with vivid anecdotes the role language beliefs play in shaping our identities, for good and ill. Beginning with literal myths, from the Tower of Babel to the bloody origins of the word “shibboleth,” Greene shows how language “experts” went from myth-making to rule-making and from building cohesive communities to building modern nations. From the notion of one language’s superiority to the common perception that phrases like “It’s me” are “bad English,” linguistic beliefs too often define “us” and distance “them,” supporting class, ethnic, or national prejudices. In short: What we hear about language is often really about the politics of identity.Governments foolishly try to police language development (the French Academy), nationalism leads to the violent suppression of minority languages (Kurdish and Basque), and even Americans fear that the most successful language in world history (English) may be threatened by increased immigration. These false language beliefs are often tied to harmful political ends and can lead to the violation of basic human rights. Conversely, political involvement in language can sometimes prove beneficial, as with the Zionist  revival of Hebrew or our present-day efforts to provide education in foreign languages essential to business, diplomacy, and intelligence. And yes, standardized languages play a crucial role in uniting modern societies.As this fascinating book shows, everything we’ve been taught to think about language may not be wrong—but it is often about something more than language alone. You Are What You Speak will certainly get people talking.

    Practical Stoicism is a collection of short readings written to help bridge the gap between the essential teachings of the great Stoic philosophers and the things we must do, in the here and now, to achieve the fulfillment they promised. Pick a starting point anywhere within its pages whenever you need a quick reminder of how to move your philosophy out of your head and into your life. Version 2.3.1

    All of the mentioned are just puppets on an invisible string doing the biddings of a few unseen puppeteers. Yes, that’s right. A few elite and undisclosed organizations send our children off to war, restrict the growth of the middle class, and limit educational opportunities for American citizens. The sad truth is this is nothing new. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin warned of the dangers and destructive power of these elites if left unchecked. These few unchosen were able, and continue, to use the Federal Reserve Banking System, universities, and war to create economic recessions and depressions that provide unnoticed benefits to a select group of social manipulators. In this stunning new book, Mark Mullen takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of secret partnerships created by unfamiliar ideologues designed to acquire most of the nation’s wealth and power. In Who Controls America, Mullen shines a light on those few elites who place greed, power, and profits above the interests of the American citizen and the pursuit of the American Dream.

    Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by", metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

    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.

    The first Indian Army officer to be promoted to the five-star rank of Field Marshal, Sam Bahadur continues to be the most admired of our Army Chiefs.

    From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises.