But where did English come from? And how has it evolved into the language used today? In Do You Speak English? Simon Horobin investigates the evolution of the English language, examining how the language continues to adapt even today, as English continues to find new speakers and new uses. Engaging with contemporary concerns about correctness, Horobin considers whether such changes are improvements, or evidence of slipping standards. What is the future for the English Language? Will Standard English continue to hold sway, or are we witnessing its replacement by newlyemerging Englishes?

    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 original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenologyand processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the Babel problem in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. Withthis provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpretation to the most intricate of linguistic constructions. For the long-awaited second edition, Steiner entirely revised the text, added new and expanded notes, and wrote a new preface setting the work in the present context of hermeneutics, poetics, and translation studies. This new edition brings the bibliography up to the present with substantiallyupdated references, including much Russian and Eastern European material. Like the towering figures of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Steiner's work is central to current literary thought. After Babel, Third Edition is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the debates raging in theacademy today.

    Avoid Grammatical Minefields with this Entertaining GuideConfused about when to use "its" or "it's" or the correct spelling of "principal" and "principle"? My Grammar and I...or Should That Be me? is a refresher course for anyone who has ever been stumped by spelling confusion, dangling modifiers, split infinities, or for those who have no idea what these things even are.Clever, informative, and fun, this delightful little handbook offers practical and humorous guidance on how to avoid falling into language pitfalls.* Sentence Structure: Let's ponder the subject or object: Is it "I" or is it "me"?* Parts of Speech: "whose" or "who's"? "which" or "that"?* Punctuation: So where does that comma go, anyway?* Spelling and Confusables: There are times when the spelling "rules" confuse.* Elements of Style: You'll find there's lots more to know about grammar.* ...and for grammar know-it-alls, there are entertaining "Smart Aleck" tidbits throughout.

    Written with the non-specialist in mind, its user-friendly style and layout, delightful original passages, and exotic scripts, will continue to fascinate the reader. This new edition has been thoroughly revised to include more languages, more countries, and up-to-date data on populations.Features include: *information on nearly 600 languages*individual descriptions of 200 languages, with sample passages and English translations*concise notes on where each language is spoken, its history, alphabet and pronunciation*coverage of every country in the world, its main language and speaker numbers*an introduction to language families

    Beginning at the 'arts' end of the subject with the common origins of languages, and finishing at the 'science' end with the newest discoveries regarding language in the brain, this stimulating guide covers all the major aspects of linguistics from a refreshing and insightful angle. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

    Some of the most prominent professionals in TV broadcasting and at major newspapers and magazines-people who really should know better-are guilty of making all-too-common grammatical errors. In this delightfully amusing, clever guide, Thomas Parrish points out real-life grammar gaffes from top-notch publications such as the New York Times and the New Yorker to illustrate just how widespread these errors are. With red pen in hand, Parrish's fictional friend the Grouchy Grammarian leads the charge, examining the forty-seven most common mistakes in English and imparting the basics of good grammar with a charming mixture of fussiness and common sense. All of which makes The Grouchy Grammarian the most entertaining, accessible how-not-to guide you'll ever read.

    For any devoted philomath (a lover of learning), this anthology of entertaining etymology is an ideal way to have fun with language.

    With more than 23,500 copies sold, this witty, accessible, and engaging book has become the new classic reference work praised by professional copyeditors as well as the general public looking for clear advice on how to write more effectively. In 1999, Choice magazine named it an Outstanding Academic Book and the American Library Association dubbed it an Outstanding Reference Source. With thousands of succinct entries, longer essays on key issues and problematic areas, and up-to-the-minute judgments on everything from trendy words to the debate over personal pronouns, GMAU is approachable yet authoritative. Since the book first appeared in 1998, Bryan Garner has diligently continued tracking how we use our language. The second edition includes hundreds of new entries ranging from Dubya to weaponize (coined in 1984 but used extensively since 9/11) to foot-and-mouth, plethora (a highfalutin equivalent of too many), Slang, Standard English, and Dialects. It also updates hundreds of existing entries. Meanwhile, Garner has written a major essay on the great grammar debate between descriptivists and prescriptivists. Painstakingly researched with copious citations from books and newspapers and newsmagazines, this new edition furthers Garner's mission to help everyone become a better writer, and to enjoy it in the process.

    His mission is urgent: Of the six thousand languages spoken in the world today, only six hundred may survive into the next century. Abley visits the exotic and frequently remote locales that are home to fading languages and constructs engaging and entertaining portraits of some of the last living speakers of these tongues. Throughout this exhilarating travelogue, he points out that the same forces that put biological species at risk -- development, globalization, loss of habitat -- are also threatening human languages, and with them, something very basic about their speakers' cultures.

    But as hundreds of new words are added annually, older ones are sacrificed. Now from the author of Forgotten English comes a collection of fascinating archaic words and phrases, providing an enticing glimpse into the past. With beguiling period illustrations, The Word Museum offers up the marvelous oddities and peculiar enchantments of old and unusual words.

    Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot.”Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye , Villon's Ballades, Nabokov’s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today’s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.

    Don't be one of them. Using examples of misuse from leading newspapers, prominent public figures and famous writers, among others, language gurus Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras explain how to avoid these perilous pitfalls in the English language. Each entry also includes short histories of how and why these mistake have happened, some of the (often surprisingly nasty) debates about which uses are (and are not) mistakes, and finally, how to use these words correctly ... or why to not use them at all. By the end of this book, every literati will be able to confidently, casually, and correctly toss in an "a priori" or a "limns" without hesitation.

    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.

    Anthony Burgess covers everything from Shakespeare's pronunciation, to the politics of speech, to the place of English in the world, and more.