I have been a Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Linguistics at Dartmouth College since 1997. Previously: Professor of Hebrew at London University. BA Oxford, Ph.D. London. Author/co-author of seven books, including The Story of Hebrew (Princeton, 2017) – one of CHOICE Magazine’s 'Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017', a Princeton University Press nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction – and (co-author Jon Schommer)A Screenful of Sugar? Prescription Drug Websites Investigated. Over 80 papers on language and its social and political impact, in particular in pharmaceutical and financial literacy.
I never considered myself a nerd, so why do I love Latin? (which I hated in school) It’s because I Iove seeing, and love teaching, what languages can do – culturally, socially, politically.
Leonhardt’s Latin: Story of a World Language gives us sweeping new perspectives. For 1000 years after the Romans, Latin was the intellectual glue of Europe, and a key to the sciences and humanities down through the 19th century. The new prestige of French, Italian, English, and the other European vernaculars in some ways threw up huge barriers.
If only Latin grammar and syntax weren’t, aargh, so challenging (though some do call this a cognitive plus). Teaser: Is English as today’s ‘world language’ actually acting as a latter-day Latin?
The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome's fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this "dead language" is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jurgen Leonhardt has written a full history of Latin from antiquity to the present, uncovering how this once parochial dialect developed into a vehicle of global communication that remained vital long after its spoken form was supplanted by modern languages.
Latin originated in the Italian region of Latium, around Rome, and became widespread as that city's imperial…
There was probably never a language documentary as compelling as The Story of English, and the companion book The Story of English was an inspiration for my own book – and my title.
How could the language of a small out-of-the-way island go global and become the entire world’s second language? Conquest? (that’s a plus and a minus) Dysfunctional spelling and crazy grammar? (joke) Political and cultural good fortune? (Definitely.) But what else? And to what ends?
And this language ‘game’ has had so many players besides the English – the Scots, the Irish, the Americans, Africa, and Asia. And of course, 35 years ago no one could have imagined how many more global roles English would be playing.
Now revised, The Story of English is the first book to tell the whole story of the English language. Originally paired with a major PBS miniseries, this book presents a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English—from its Anglo-Saxon origins some two thousand years ago to the present day, when English is the dominant language of commerce and culture with more than one billion English speakers around the world. From Cockney, Scouse, and Scots to Gulla, Singlish, Franglais, and the latest African American slang, this sweeping history of the English language is the essential introduction for anyone who…
Many language stories have sad endings. I don’t like to over-personalize a language; it’s primarily the users that put the spice into a language or let it ‘die’. Or in the case of Yiddish, murdered in their millions.
Dovid Katz’s title evokes the extraordinary vitality of Yiddish – for centuries the language of Europe’s Jews and one of the major literary languages of the 20th century, until Nazism and Stalinism consumed all. Many survivors reached Israel, where Hebrew has taken its place. But Yiddish lives on. To me that matters.
For tens of thousands (and thriving) survivors’ descendants in the US and Europe, Yiddish is still a first language, preserving a traditional religious lifestyle Many more, whose grandparents (like mine) migrated and raised children in other tongues, still cherish Yiddish for its songs and jokes. As do I. Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry David – scratch the surface and it’s Yiddish. A bittersweet tale, ongoing.
From one of the world's foremost scholars of Yiddish, a sweeping history of the language, its culture, and its literature-with a provocative argument about its future as a living language. Words on Fire offers a rich, engaging account of the history and evolution of the Yiddish language. Drawing on almost thirty years of scholarship, prominent Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz traces the origins of Yiddish back to the Europe of a thousand years ago, and shows how those origins are themselves an uninterrupted continuation of the previous three millennia of Jewish history and culture in the Near East. Words on Fire…
Some of the best language stories lie dissected in the work of social scientists. Not an easy read. But once in a while, someone brings it to life, enjoyably.
One such is John Edwards, whose ‘Multilingualism’ is required reading for my course on language and politics. Most countries are host to several languages – often a source (or a product) of ethnic pride, and why not? Sometimes, however, full-scale political and economic interventions may occur. And then, a language conflict is on the cards.
Nationalism often enflames such situations but sometimes wisdom and fortune prevail. Not long ago, Catalan and Quebecois French faced a bleak future, but have now seen political and cultural rejuvenation. But other vectors can change the story: Take the Southern Irish: The occupation over, they saw little cultural or economic value in Gaelic, which is now severely endangered.
Multilingualism is everywhere in our globalised society. Delving into the 'social life' of languages, John Edwards provides a brief yet compelling overview of multilingualism and its sociocultural implications and consequences. Covering major topics including language origins, language death, lingua francas, pidgins, creoles and artificial languages, this book provides a complete introduction to what happens when languages meet.
A vital primer for anybody interested in multilingualism, this new edition has been refreshed and updated, expanding its coverage and adding new topics such as linguistic imperialism, minority languages, and folk linguistics. A brand new chapter on recent developments also covers the linguistic…
You can piece together another trove of language stories here, this time from 20 modern Asian countries – each profiled by a different scholar. Once again, I adopted this for a course and the students were engrossed.
To take just one story: for 2000 years the vast Chinese empire had a centralized administrative tongue against a chatter of spoken dialects. But then, in the early 20th century, a sea change: the ripple of Western nationalism and liberalism that carried away the empire also produced a movement for wholesale language reform – creating one standard spoken language to unite the masses, simplifying the daunting Chinese script, even introducing Roman script.
In the end, the Communist Party settled on a Roman script just as a learning tool for children. They couldn’t erase 3000 years of history. And as I was writing my story, the parallels with China kept coming at me: The sweeping effects of modernity and nationalism, but an ancient script that says ‘Keep me’.
Language and National Identity in Asia is a comprehensive introduction to the role of language in the construction and development of nations and national identities in Asia.
Leading scholars from all over the world investigate the role languages have played and now play in the formation of the national and social identity in countries throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia. They consider the relation of the regions' languages to national, ethnic, and cultural identity, and examine the status of and interactions between majority, official, and minority languages.
Illustrated with maps and accessibly written this book will interest all those concerned…
The Story of Hebrewtakes
readers from the opening verses of Genesis―which seemingly describe the
creation of Hebrew itself―to the reincarnation of Hebrew as the everyday
language of the Jewish state. Lewis Glinert explains the uses and
meanings of Hebrew in ancient Israel and its role as a medium for wisdom
and prayer. He describes the early rabbis' preservation of Hebrew
following the Babylonian exile, the challenges posed by Arabic, and the
prolific use of Hebrew in Diaspora creativity, spirituality, and science.
Glinert looks at the conflicted relationship Christians had with Hebrew
from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, the language's fatal
rivalry with Yiddish, the dreamers and schemers that made modern Hebrew a
reality, and how a lost pre-Holocaust textual ethos is being renewed
today by Orthodox Jews.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
