From the celebrated author of Lingo, a whistle-stop tour of the world’s twenty most-spoken languages, exploring history, geography, linguistics, and culture―showing how the language we speak reflects
Haitian Creole developed around the 18th century during France’s colonial occupation, and contains elements of French along with strong influences from Spanish, Arabic, Táino, Arawak, and English. It
This volume gathers a series of papers that bring the study of grammatical and syntactic constructions in Greek and Latin under the perspective of theories of embodied meaning developed in cognitive l
The Oxford Guide to Middle High German is the most comprehensive self-contained treatment of Middle High German available in English. It covers the language, literature, history, and culture of German
This volume provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Gothic, the earliest attested language of the Germanic family (apart from runic inscriptions), dating to the fourth century. The bulk of the e
Audio recordings of English are available from the first half of the twentieth century and thus complement the written data sources for the recent history of the language. This book is the first to bring together a team of globally recognised scholars to document and analyse these early recordings in a single volume. Looking at examples of regional varieties of English from England, Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Canada and other anglophone countries, the volume explores both standard and vernacular varieties, and demonstrates how accents of English have changed between the late nineteenth century and the present day. The socio-phonetic examinations of the recordings will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, the history of the English language, language variation and change, phonetics, and phonology.
Every language has been influenced in some way by other languages. In many cases, this influence is reflected in words which have been absorbed from other languages as the names for newer items or id
Changing Names investigates, in relation to the ancient Greek world, the ways in which preferences in personal name-giving change: through shifts in population, cultural contact and imperialism, the p
Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century sch
Drawing on the resources created by the Institute of Historical Dialectology at the University of Edinburgh (now the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics), such as eLALME (the electronic v
From the early years of the Weimar Republic until the collapse of Hitler’s regime, demonizing modernist art as a symptom of the corruption of German culture was a standard trope in National Socialist
