By Nicholas Ostler
The tale of the realm within the final 5 thousand years is primarily the tale of its languages. a few shared language is what binds any neighborhood jointly and makes attainable either the residing of a typical historical past and the telling of it.
Yet the heritage of the world's nice languages has been little or no instructed. Empires of the Word, via the wide-ranging linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the 1st to collect the stories in all their excellent kind: the superb concepts in schooling, tradition, and international relations devised through audio system of Sumerian and its successors within the heart East, correct as much as the Arabic of the current day; the uncanny resilience of chinese language via twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed development of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the enticing self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave beginning to the languages of contemporary Europe; and the worldwide unfold of English.
Besides those epic ahievements, language disasters are both interesting: Why did German get left at the back of? Why did Egyptian, which had survived overseas takeovers for 3 millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in glossy Indonesia, even though the Netherlands had governed the East Indies for so long as the British governed India?
As this booklet wonderfully and authoritatively finds, the language heritage of the area indicates eloquently the true personality of peoples; and, for the entire fresh tehnical mastery of English, not anything promises our language's long term preeminence. The language destiny, just like the language previous, could be filled with surprises.
Read or Download Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World PDF
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Additional resources for Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Example text
RRG only recognizes one level of syntactic representation which is directly linked with a semantic representation. 5 SYNTACTIC REPRESENTATION ↑ Linking algorithm ↓ SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION Figure 1: General structure of RRG (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997:21) The primary mechanism in the RRG approach to semantics is a system of lexical representation involving predicate decomposition. , classes based on inherent aspectual properties (Van Valin 1993:34). Vendler (1967) devised a universal four-way semantic distinction between: 1) states, 2) accomplishments, 3) achievements, and 4) activities.
The first step in linking from semantics to syntax is to determine the actor and undergoer assignments. Actor and undergoer are semantic macroroles. Actor refers to the entity which instigates, controls or effects the action expressed by the verb. Undergoer indicates the entity affected by the action or state expressed by the verb (Walton 1986:45). The prototypical Actor is an agent, whereas the prototypical Undergoer is a patient (Van Valin 1993:46). The principles for determining the number and nature of macroroles are shown in (5) (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997:152).
G. irrealis mati ‘die/IRR’ and realis meti ‘die/RLS’) which are in complementary distribution with prefixes. The Leipzig Glossing Rules use a backslash to separate the stem gloss and the grammatical category label when a morphophonological change of the stem such as ablaut occurs. 36 JSEALS Vol. 1 (26) M-udaʔ ow lampu. NOM lamp I will extinguish the lamp. (27) Kirobi, i-m-udaʔ ow lampu. NOM lamp Last night, I extinguished the lamp. (28) Puda-an ku gulu. GEN first I will extinguish it first. (29) Lampu pudaʔ ku.
