Search results for "languages"
Items we need to order for you
Dictionary of Languages
Approximately how many languages compose the Bantu language group of central and southern Africa? What is the name of the language spoken in Hawaii by an estimated two thousand people? What Western European language is not known to be related to any other language family in the world-and is considered by linguists to be one of the most difficult to learn? These are only a few of the questions language lovers, linguists, and lay readers will be able to answer with the Dictionary of Languages-an easy-to-navigate, authoritative guide to the world's languages and language groups at the end of the twentieth century. Andrew Dalby had the needs and interests of general readers in mind when he compiled this comprehensive reference work-most other language guides are written for scholars, and many include little or none of the absorbing social, cultural, geographic, and historical details that are brought together here.In the Dictionary of Languages, readers will find: *a selection of four hundred languages and language groups, arranged alphabetically, with rich, detailed descriptions of the genesis, development, and current status of each; *more than two hundred maps displaying where the languages are spoken today; *sidebars showing alphabets, numerals, and other enriching facts *a comprehensive index listing additional languages, guiding readers to the nearest language groups with full writeups and maps; *charts breaking down large language groups-such as Bantu or Austroasiatic languages-by geographic region and approximate number of speakers. In a world where geopolitical boundaries often explain little about the people that live within them, where we may read about Kurd and Khmer in the same newspaper and be expected to be conversant about each-if not conversant in each-Dalby's single, information-packed volume helps us make sense of the rich mosaic of world languages.
R 2,943.00
Concise Compendium of the World's Languages
From Afrikaans to Zulu, almost 100 languages from the comprehensive Compendium of the World's Languages are featured in this new concise version. Many articles have been revised. The Concise Compendium presents a detailed comparative study of the major and many of the lesser known languages of the world. Included are representatives of all language families, with samples of Amerindian, such as Navajo and of African languages, such as Fulani and Nama; languages of politically independent groups in the former USSR, like Uzbek and Belorussian; those of political pressure groups, such as Breton and Catalan and significant community/ethnic languages, including Amharic and Vietnamese. Throughout, the treatment is factual and jargon-free. Articles are ordered alphabetically and each has a standard structure for ease of reference: * general historical and sociolinguistic introduction * writing system * sound system * grammatical system A passage from the Gospel of St. John illustrates each language with a written tradition. These scripts are explained in an appendix at the end of the book. Presents 100 of the world's major languages and representatives of different language groups, politically significant languages and particularly interesting ones.
R 4,522.50
Languages of the World
Are you curious to know what all languages have in common and how they differ? Do you want to find out how language can be used to trace different peoples and their past? Now in its fourth edition, this fascinating book guides beginners through the rich diversity of the world's languages. It presupposes no background in linguistics, and introduces key concepts with the help of problem sets, end-of-chapter exercises and an extensive bibliography. It is illustrated with detailed maps and charts of language families throughout, and engaging sidebars and 'food for thought' boxes contextualise and bring the languages to life with demographic, social, historical, and geographical facts. This edition has been extensively updated with a new section on the languages of the Caribbean, new problem sets, and an updated glossary and index. Supplementary online materials includes links to all websites mentioned, and answers to the exercises for instructors.
R 1,857.00
Languages of the World
Are you curious to know what all languages have in common and how they differ? Do you want to find out how language can be used to trace different peoples and their past? Now in its fourth edition, this fascinating book guides beginners through the rich diversity of the world's languages. It presupposes no background in linguistics, and introduces key concepts with the help of problem sets, end-of-chapter exercises and an extensive bibliography. It is illustrated with detailed maps and charts of language families throughout, and engaging sidebars and 'food for thought' boxes contextualise and bring the languages to life with demographic, social, historical, and geographical facts. This edition has been extensively updated with a new section on the languages of the Caribbean, new problem sets, and an updated glossary and index. Supplementary online materials includes links to all websites mentioned, and answers to the exercises for instructors.
R 5,491.00
Languages of the World
This 3rd edition 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; English borrowings from other languages; and an introduction to language families.
R 3,449.20
Languages: A Very Short Introduction
How many languages are there? What differentiates one language from another? Are new languages still being discovered? Why are so many languages disappearing? The diversity of languages today is varied, but it is steadily declining. In this Very Short Introduction, Stephen Anderson answers the above questions by looking at the science behind languages. Considering a wide range of different languages and linguistic examples, he demonstrates how languages are not uniformly distributed around the world; just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plants and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. Exploring the basis for linguistic classification and raising questions about how we identify a language, as well as considering signed languages as well as spoken, Anderson examines the wider social issues of losing languages, and their impact in terms of the endangerment of cultures and peoples. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
R 297.00
Germanic Languages
This study sets out to provide an up-to-date survey of 12 Germanic languages, from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish. Spoken by more than 450 million native speakers worldwide, the Germanic languages have enormous cultural and social significance. This work offers a chapter-length description of each language, focusing on the structure of the languages as they are spoken today, and also giving an analysis of language history and development. Based on recent scholarship, "The Germanic Languages" presents detailed research both on the major Germanic languages, and rarely-covered minor languages such as Yiddish, Faroese, Afrikaans, Pennsylvanian German and the Germanic Creoles. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, in a format designed for comparative study; information on each language includes: an introductory description of social context and the development of the language; extensive discussions of phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, the main dialects and a bibliography with sources in English and other languages.
R 27,393.60
Languages In The World
This innovative introduction outlines the structure and distribution of the world’s languages, charting their evolution over the past 200,000 years. Balances linguistic analysis with socio-historical and political context, offering a cohesive picture of the relationship between language and societyProvides an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of language by drawing not only on the diverse fields of linguistics (structural, linguist anthropology, historical, sociolinguistics), but also on history, biology, genetics, sociology, and moreIncludes nine detailed language profiles on Kurdish, Arabic, Tibetan, Hawaiian, Vietnamese, Tamil, !Xóõ (Taa), Mongolian, and QuichéA companion website offers a host of supplementary materials including, sound files, further exercises, and detailed introductory information for students new to linguistics
R 3,471.00
Turkic Languages
The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from southern Iran to the Arctic Ocean and from the Balkans to the great wall of China. There are currently 20 literary languages in the group, the most important among them being Turkish with over 70 million speakers; other major languages covered include Azeri, Bashkir, Chuvash, Gagauz, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Noghay, Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, Yakut, Yellow Uyghur and languages of Iran and South Siberia.The Turkic Languages is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Turkic family. Seen from a linguistic typology point of view, Turkic languages are particularly interesting because of their astonishing morphosyntactic regularity, their vast geographical distribution, and their great stability over time.This volume builds upon a work which has already become a defining classic of Turkic language study. The present, thoroughly revised edition updates and augments those authoritative accounts and reflects recent and ongoing developments in the languages themselves, as well as our further enhanced understanding of the relations and patterns of influence between them. The result is the fruit of decades-long experience in the teaching of the Turkic languages, their philology and literature, and also of a wealth of new insights into the linguistic phenomena and cultural interactions defining their development and use, both historically and in the present day.Each chapter combines modern linguistic analysis with traditional historical linguistics; a uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. Written by an international team of experts, The Turkic Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, Turcology, and Near Eastern and Oriental Studies.
R 27,371.85
Mayan Languages
The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family; includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script; provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages; includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts. Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.
R 4,421.15
Munda Languages
The Munda group of languages of the Austroasiatic family are spoken within central and eastern India by almost ten million people. To date, they are the least well-known and least documented languages of the Indian subcontinent.This unprecedented and original work draws together a distinguished group of international experts in the field of Munda language research and presents current assessments of a wide range of typological and comparative-historical issues, providing agendas for future research.Representing the current state of Munda Linguistics, this volume provides detailed descriptions of almost all of the languages in the family, in addition to a brief chapter discussing the enigmatic Nihali language.
R 27,419.46
Languages In The World
This innovative introduction outlines the structure and distribution of the world’s languages, charting their evolution over the past 200,000 years. Balances linguistic analysis with socio-historical and political context, offering a cohesive picture of the relationship between language and societyProvides an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of language by drawing not only on the diverse fields of linguistics (structural, linguist anthropology, historical, sociolinguistics), but also on history, biology, genetics, sociology, and moreIncludes nine detailed language profiles on Kurdish, Arabic, Tibetan, Hawaiian, Vietnamese, Tamil, !Xóõ (Taa), Mongolian, and QuichéA companion website offers a host of supplementary materials including, sound files, further exercises, and detailed introductory information for students new to linguistics
R 1,470.00
Semitic Languages
The Semitic Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language clusters within this language family, from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms.This second edition has been fully revised, with new chapters and a wealth of additional material. New features include the following:• new introductory chapters on Proto-Semitic grammar and Semitic linguistic typology• an additional chapter on the place of Semitic as a subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, and several chapters on modern forms of Arabic, Aramaic and Ethiopian Semitic• text samples of each individual language, transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, with standard linguistic word-by-word glossing as well as translation• new maps and tables present information visually for easy reference.This unique resource is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and language. It will be of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, linguistic anthropology and language development.
R 3,035.60
World's Major Languages
The World's Major Languages features over 50 of the world's languages and language families. This revised edition includes updated bibliographies for each chapter and up-to-date census figures. The featured languages have been chosen based on the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance. Each language is looked at in depth, and the chapters provide information on both grammatical features and on salient features of the language's history and cultural role.The World’s Major Languages is an accessible and essential reference work for linguists.
R 2,564.00
Semitic Languages
The Semitic Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language clusters within this language family, from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms.This second edition has been fully revised, with new chapters and a wealth of additional material. New features include the following:• new introductory chapters on Proto-Semitic grammar and Semitic linguistic typology• an additional chapter on the place of Semitic as a subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, and several chapters on modern forms of Arabic, Aramaic and Ethiopian Semitic• text samples of each individual language, transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, with standard linguistic word-by-word glossing as well as translation• new maps and tables present information visually for easy reference.This unique resource is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and language. It will be of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, linguistic anthropology and language development.
R 15,955.48
Romance Languages
This volume contains a collection of papers that deal with Romance linguistics from two broad perspectives: multilingualism and language acquisition. Some of the contributions investigate these phenomena in the light of language contact, language attitudes and code switching in multilingual societies or multilingual families. Others focus on the acquisition of rhythmic patterns, intonation or even emotions in a second language. Many of the contributions present themes related to oral production or speech. The book in itself is multilingual and includes papers written in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English.
R 2,041.00
Languages from the World of the Bible
The breakthrough of the alphabetic script early in the first millennium BCE coincides with the appearance of several new languages and civilizations in ancient Syria-Palestine. Together, they form the cultural setting in which ancient Israel, the Hebrew Bible, and, transformed by Hellenism, the New Testament took shape. This book contains concise yet thorough and lucid overviews of ancient Near Eastern languages united by alphabetic writing and illuminates their interaction during the first 1000 years of their attestation. All chapters are informed by the most recent scholarship, contain fresh insights, provide numerous examples from the most pertinent sources, and share a clear historical framework that makes it easier to trace processes of contact and convergence in this highly diversified speech area. They also address non-specialists. The following topics are discussed: Alphabetic writing (A. Millard), Ugaritic (A. Gianto), Phoenician and Hebrew (H. Gzella), Transjordanian languages (K. Beyer), Old and Imperial Aramaic (M. Folmer), Epigraphic South Arabian (R. Hasselbach), Old Persian (M. de Vaan/A. Lubotsky), Greek (A. Willi).
R 6,494.67
Heritage Languages and their Speakers
This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field. Using examples from a wide range of languages, it covers all the main components of grammar, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, from sociolinguistics to child language acquisition and other relevant aspects of psycholinguistics. The book offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages. It is explicit about instances where, based on our current knowledge, we are unable to reach a clear decision on a particular claim or analytical point, and therefore provides a much-needed resource for future research.
R 2,000.48
Celtic Languages
This volume describes the six modern Celtic languages. Four of these, Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton, are living community languages. The other two, Manx and Cornish, survived into the modern period, but are no longer extant as community languages, though they are the subject of enthusiastic revivals. The Celtic Languages sets them briefly in their Indo-European context, and states their general relationships within the broader Celtic language family. Individual linguistic studies are first placed in their sociolinguistic and sociohistorical context. A detailed synchronic account of each language then follows, including syntax, morphology, phonology, morphophonology, dialect variation and distribution. Each description is based on a common plan, thus facilitating comparison amongst the different languages. This latest volume in the Cambridge Language Surveys will be welcomed by all scholars of the Celtic languages, but has also been designed to be accessible to any reader with only a basic knowledge of linguistics. It is the only modern account to deal with all surviving Celtic languages in this detail.
R 3,589.78
Australian Languages
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 40,000 years, speaking about 250 languages. Through examination of published and unpublished materials on each of the individual languages, Professor Dixon surveys the ways in which the languages vary typologically and presents a profile of this long-established linguistic area. The areal distribution of most features is illustrated with more than 30 maps, showing that the languages tend to move in cyclic fashion with respect to many of the parameters. There is also an index of languages and language groups. Professor Dixon, a pioneering scholar in the field, brings an interesting perspective to this diverse and complex material.
R 4,929.90
Possible and Probable Languages
In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differencescould be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideasfrom functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of UniversalThe book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade.
R 3,790.00
Ancient Languages of Europe
This book, derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, describes the ancient languages of Europe, for the convenience of students and specialists working in that area. Each chapter of the work focuses on an individual language or, in some instances, a set of closely related varieties of a language. Providing a full descriptive presentation, each of these chapters examines the writing system(s), phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of that language, and places the language within its proper linguistic and historical context. The volume brings together an international array of scholars, each a leading specialist in ancient language study. While designed primarily for scholars and students of linguistics, this work will prove invaluable to all whose studies take them into the realm of ancient language.
R 3,055.00
Jewish Languages from A to Z
Jewish Languages from A to Z provides an engaging and enjoyable overview of the rich variety of languages spoken and written by Jews over the past three thousand years. The book covers more than 50 different languages and language varieties. These include not only well-known Jewish languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, but also more exotic languages like Chinese, Esperanto, Malayalam, and Zulu, all of which have a fascinating Jewish story to be told. Each chapter presents the special features of the language variety in question, a discussion of the history of the associated Jewish community, and some examples of literature and other texts produced in it. The book thus takes readers on a stimulating voyage around the Jewish world, from ancient Babylonia to 21st-century New York, via such diverse locations as Tajikistan, South Africa, and the Caribbean. The chapters are accompanied by numerous full-colour photographs of the literary treasures produced by Jewish language-speaking communities, from ancient stone inscriptions to medieval illuminated manuscripts to contemporary novels and newspapers. This comprehensive survey of Jewish languages is designed to be accessible to all readers with an interest in languages or history, regardless of their background—no prior knowledge of linguistics or Jewish history is assumed.
R 1,942.00
Languages of Japan
This book is a detailed survey of the two main indigenous languages of Japan, Japanese and Ainu. No genetic relationship has been established between them, and structurally they differ significantly. Professor Shibatani has therefore divided his study into two independent parts. The first is a most comprehensive study of the polysynthetic Ainu language. The second part deals extensively with Japanese. It discusses topics from the evolution of the writing system and the differences between men's and women's speech, to issues of greater theoretical complexity, such as phonology, the lexicon and word-formation, and the syntax of agglutinative morphology. As an American-trained scholar in Japan, the author is in an unique postion that affords him a dual perspective on language deriving from Western linguistic scholarship and the Japanese grammatical tradition.
R 5,541.90
Possible and Probable Languages
In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differencescould be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideasfrom functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of Universal Grammar. The book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade.
R 3,017.00
Whistled Languages
This monograph deals with curious and little-known acoustic systems of commun ication based on whistling that are in use at the present time in many parts of the world and have had, on the evidence available, even greater currency in the past. In spite of their wide distribution, they have not so far received the attention they might have been expected to attract: linguistically and in other ways they are most interesting. For it should be realized that they are much more than mere codes or conventional systems of signals; they function in exactly the same way as speech (in the sense we normally use the term), being in fact rather extraordinary realizations of the languages spoken in the re gions where they occur. They utilize the vocabulary, grammar and, in many cases to a large extent, the phonology of the local speech. However their phonetic system is profoundly modified acoustically and (in some cases less so) from the point of view of articulation, because the glottal tone of every day communication, the "voice", is repl aced by a whistl e which carries the in formation. The advantage of this procedure, from the point of view of the user, is a vastly increased range as well as, under certain circumstances, a degree of secrecy. It will be shown that whistled languages appear in two main, very different forms.
R 1,576.95
Dravidian Languages
The Dravidian languages are spoken by over 200 million people in South Asia and in Diaspora communities around the world, and constitute the world's fifth largest language family. It consists of about 26 languages in total including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, as well as over 20 non-literary languages. In this book, Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, one of the most eminent Dravidianists of our time, provides a comprehensive study of the phonological and grammatical structure of the whole Dravidian family from different aspects. He describes its history and writing systems, discusses its structure and typology, and considers its lexicon. Distant and more recent contacts between Dravidian and other language groups are also discussed. With its comprehensive coverage this book will be welcomed by all students of Dravidian languages and will be of interest to linguists in various branches of the discipline as well as Indologists.
R 8,654.53
Modern Languages
`This is an important book. A very important book. It is important because it both challenges traditional understandings of language teaching and learning in universities, and rejects new understandings which only devalue the potential power of language learning…. This is not, however, merely a critique. The authors offer a compelling alternative, and do so in a language and style which mirror the alternative proposed…. The authors illustrate their ideas through snapshots of classroom practices which help to build up a picture of what is meant. Such illustrations are invaluable′ - Teaching in Higher Education′Every so often a book comes along filled with so much wisdom, critical insight, and sheer humanity that it takes one′s breath away. Modern Languages is such a book. Reclaiming language as both a site of struggle and a crucial sphere of politics, Alison Phipps and Mike Gonzalez make it clear that matters of language lie at the heart of any viable pedagogy in which democracy matters. But not a language(s) drained of critical possibilities, passion, power, or imagination, but language as the context and medium in which meaning is produced, affective investments made, and experiences are given legitimacy. Any educator, parent, student, or citizen of the world who cares about democracy, pedagogy, and the crucial role of modern languages creating the conditions for agency, politics, and, yes, hope should read this book′ - Professor Henry Giroux, Waterbury Chair, Penn State University, USA′I expect it will become a much-thumbed handbook for teachers in search of inspiration, and I am sure it will be a catalyst to further debate and exploration. But I suspect it may also become a turning point for thinking about modern languages. This book exudes life and hope. It shows a future where languages can thrive because they are an integral and indispensable part of what it means to be human. It is an exhilarating prospect to help to bring that future closer′ - Professor Michael Kelly, Director, Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, University of Southampton′Modern Languages is argumentative in the best sense: it is intellectually ambitious and is making a bold and brave argument of its own. The story is exciting, and offers a radical way of reconceiving teaching and learning in languages. It is written with evident passion and conviction and it seeks to reach out to an audience. The authors come across as committed and even as brilliant teachers. This is a book for its age but yet may have a long shelf-life. It has made me think about modern languages and language teaching and learning in quite new ways′ - Professor Ronald Barnett, Institute of Education, University of London′This book pushes the traditional field of Modern Languages into new challenges and it crosses intradisciplinary borders between different languages and cultures. It is intrinsically about languaging and about being intercultural. The authors argue that languages
R 3,447.48
Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar
Some 800 Austronesian languages are spoken in the area extending from Madagascar to eastern Indonesia and to the north to Taiwan and the Philippines. They vary greatly in almost every possible respect, including the size and social make-up of the speech communities and their typological profiles. This book is designed to serve as a reference work and in-depth introduction to these languages, providing a source of basic information for linguists and other professionals concerned with this area. It highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of this group of languages while at the same time keeping track of their common heritage.Five introductory articles on linguistic history, language politics, language endangerment, ritual speech and special registers, and major typological features have the entire area in their scope and provide a balanced and up-to-date discussion of the major issues. The core of the volume consists of grammatical sketches of twenty languages plus three chapters dealing with different aspects of Malay (Old Malay, Malayic varieties and Colloquial Indonesian), representing a good cross-section of the linguistic diversity found in the area.
R 27,428.57
Celtic Languages
This volume describes the six modern Celtic languages. Four of these, Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton, are living community languages. The other two, Manx and Cornish, survived into the modern period, but are no longer extant as community languages, though they are the subject of enthusiastic revivals. The Celtic Languages sets them briefly in their Indo-European context, and states their general relationships within the broader Celtic language family. Individual linguistic studies are first placed in their sociolinguistic and sociohistorical context. A detailed synchronic account of each language then follows, including syntax, morphology, phonology, morphophonology, dialect variation and distribution. Each description is based on a common plan, thus facilitating comparison amongst the different languages. This latest volume in the Cambridge Language Surveys will be welcomed by all scholars of the Celtic languages, but has also been designed to be accessible to any reader with only a basic knowledge of linguistics. It is the only modern account to deal with all surviving Celtic languages in this detail.
R 8,999.90
Whistled Languages
The main focus of this monograph on whistled speech is the result of a worldwide inquiry primarily based on the author’s unprecedented fieldwork and laboratory experience. The different questions raised by the origin and the evolution of whistled forms of languages are also explored, including the role of environmental constraints in the emergence of whistled speech, their phonetic and phonological typology, the cognitive processing of whistled signals, monogenesis and polygenesis scenarios, the hypothesis of a whistled system preceding voiced speech, the intricate relationship between music and language in whistling, and the convergence/divergence with whistled communication among animals (birds, dolphins and primates).This book also includes several documents and a chapter prepared in collaboration with René-Guy Busnel, a pioneer in the studies of whistled forms of languages who has worked with five different populations using whistled speech (from the late 60s to the early 90s).The author has been intensively studying this fascinating language practice for the past 12 years, including 30 months of onsite research in collaboration with the cultural representatives of approximately twenty linguistic communities around the world.Whistled speech represents an ancient traditional telecommunication system that has survived on all inhabited continents of our planet. In it, a whistle replaces the voice and carries the information. However, this practice does not replace ordinary speech but is used in a complementary way. It serves to increase the audible range, but also under certain circumstances, the degree of secrecy of spoken communications.Whistled speech is adapted to the structure of each language, to specific traditional rural activities such as hunting or shepherding, and to specific ecological milieux. It is today a severely endangered speech register that provides an alternative insight into the nature of human language.
R 3,431.03
Semitic Languages
This book offers a thorough, authoritative account of the branches of Semitic. These include some of the world's oldest attested languages, among them Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic, as well as various modern languages. Gideon Goldenberg describes their history, geographical distribution, writing systems, and genetic classification. He examines their main features and distinctive characteristics, including their phonology, morphemes, derivationalmorphology, verbal systems, syntactic relationships, and their typological significance. He also discusses the pioneering work and achievements of medieval Arabic and Hebrew scholars in theoretical and descriptive aspects of grammar, lexicography, and philology. Professor Goldenberg's balanced,undogmatic account presents the fruits of a lifetime of original research: it will be widely welcomed by scholars and advanced students of the Semitic languages and linguistic typology.
R 7,347.00
Syntax of Verb Initial Languages
This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take acrosslinguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to some old problems and debates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order.
R 7,199.79
Dravidian Languages
The Dravidian language family is the world's fourth largest with nearly 250 million speakers across South Asia from Pakistan to Nepal, from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka. This authoritative reference source provides a unique description of the languages, covering their grammatical structure and historical development, plus sociolinguistic features. Each chapter combines a modern linguistic perspective with traditional historical linguistics, and a uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. New to this edition are chapters on Beṭṭa Kuṟumba, Kuṛux, Kūvi and Malayāḷam, and enlarged sections in various existing chapters, as well as updated bibliographies and demographic data throughout.The Dravidian Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, and will also be of interest to readers in the fields of comparative literature, areal linguistics and South Asian studies.
R 13,945.95
Contact Languages
Why do groups of speakers in certain times and places come up with new varieties of languages? What are the social settings that determine whether a mixed language, a pidgin or a Creole will develop, and how can we understand the ways in which different languages contribute to the new grammar? Through the study of Malay contact varieties such as Baba Malay, Cocos Malay and Sri Lanka Malay, as well as the Asian Portuguese vernacular of Macau, and China Coast Pidgin, this book explores the social and structural dynamics that underlie the fascinating phenomenon of the creation of new, or restructured, grammars. It emphasizes the importance and interplay of historical documentation, socio-cultural observation and linguistic analysis in the study of contact languages, offering an evolutionary framework for the study of contact language formation - including pidgins and Creoles - in which historical, socio-cultural and typological observations come together.
R 5,278.46
Amazonian Languages
The Amazon Basin is arguably both one of the least-known and the most complex linguistic regions in the world. It is the home of some 300 languages belonging to around twenty language families, plus more than a dozen genetic isolates, and many of these languages (often incompletely documented and mostly endangered) show properties that constitute exceptions to received ideas about linguistic universals. This book provides an overview in a single volume of this rich and exciting linguistic area. The editors and contributors have sought to make their descriptions as clear and accessible as possible, in order to provide a basis for further research on the structural characteristics of Amazonian languages and their genetic and areal relationships, as well as a point of entry to important cross-linguistic data for the wider constituency of theoretical linguists.
R 8,997.71
Heritage Languages and their Speakers
This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field. Using examples from a wide range of languages, it covers all the main components of grammar, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, from sociolinguistics to child language acquisition and other relevant aspects of psycholinguistics. The book offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages. It is explicit about instances where, based on our current knowledge, we are unable to reach a clear decision on a particular claim or analytical point, and therefore provides a much-needed resource for future research.
R 4,298.44
Syllable and Word Languages
This is the first volume concerned with the phonological typology of syllable and word languages, based on the model of a complex, multi-layered and hierarchically structured phonological system. The main typological claim is that the phonetic and phonological make-up of a language depends on the relevance of the prosodic categories. In previous research, the syllable and the phonological word have already proved to be typologically important. The contributions in this volume discuss theoretical questions and address issues such as the variable structure of the phonological word, the interplay between phonetics and phonology as well as the effect of a language’s phonological make-up on its morphology or lexicon. The volume provides detailed synchronic and diachronic analyses of (Non-)Indo-European languages which will serve as a basis for further typological research.
R 6,497.00
Native Languages of South America
In South America indigenous languages are extremely diverse. There are over one hundred language families in this region alone. Contributors from around the world explore the history and structure of these languages, combining insights from archaeology and genetics with innovative linguistic analysis. The book aims to uncover regional patterns and potential deeper genealogical relations between the languages. Based on a large-scale database of features from sixty languages, the book analyses major language families such as Tupian and Arawakan, as well as the Quechua/Aymara complex in the Andes, the Isthmo-Colombian region and the Andean foothills. It explores the effects of historical change in different grammatical systems and fills gaps in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) database, where South American languages are underrepresented. An important resource for students and researchers interested in linguistics, anthropology and language evolution.
R 5,657.82
Romance Languages
Ti Alkire and Carol Rosen trace the changes that led from colloquial Latin to five major Romance languages, those which ultimately became national or transnational languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Trends in spoken Latin altered or dismantled older categories in phonology and morphology, while the regional varieties of speech, evolving under diverse influences, formed new grammatical patterns, each creating its own internal regularities. Documentary sources for spoken Latin show the beginnings of this process, which comes to full fruition in the medieval emergence of written Romance languages. This book newly distills the facts into an appealing program of study, including exercises, and makes the difficult issues clear, taking well motivated and sometimes innovative stands. It provides not only an essential guide for those new to the topic, but also a reliable compendium for the specialist.
R 4,099.16
Introduction to the Languages of the World
The only textbook of its kind, An Introduction to the Languages of the World is designed to introduce beginning linguistics students, who now typically start their study with little background in languages, to the variety of the languages of the world. It is ideal for use in courses where students have mastered the basic principles of linguistics but lack background in the broad range of language phenomena found in the world's languages, such as vowelharmony and ergative constructions. It offers students an opportunity to explore, at various levels, structures of very different, highly interesting languages without necessarily possessing a speaking or reading knowledge of these languages.Lyovin explains the classification of languages, discussing not only genetic classification but typological and sociolinguistic classification as well. He follows this with an explication of writing systems. A chapter is devoted to each of the world's continents, with in-depth analyses of representative languages of Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America, and a separate chapter covers pidgins and creoles. Helpful features include an appendix of nineteen maps, student exercises, andsuggestions for further reading.
R 2,605.58
