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Author: Derk Jan Eppink Publisher: Lannoo Publishers (Acc) ISBN: 9789020970227 Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
For more than 7 years, Derk-Jan Eppink worked as a senior official behind the scenes in the European Commission. The Commission is not well known to the general public, but makes decisions which affect the daily lives of almost half a billion Europeans. Now that he has left the Comission to tkae up a new job in New York, Eppink looks back on his time in Europe. “ Eppink's book gives the reader a rare and ironic glimpse of life in Europe's corridors of power. In his inimitable style, he sketches a portrait of the "European Mandarins', the European Commission's senior administrators, of whom a German Euro-Commissioner recently said "they have too much power and are too little controlled".
Author: Derk Jan Eppink Publisher: Lannoo Publishers (Acc) ISBN: 9789020970227 Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
For more than 7 years, Derk-Jan Eppink worked as a senior official behind the scenes in the European Commission. The Commission is not well known to the general public, but makes decisions which affect the daily lives of almost half a billion Europeans. Now that he has left the Comission to tkae up a new job in New York, Eppink looks back on his time in Europe. “ Eppink's book gives the reader a rare and ironic glimpse of life in Europe's corridors of power. In his inimitable style, he sketches a portrait of the "European Mandarins', the European Commission's senior administrators, of whom a German Euro-Commissioner recently said "they have too much power and are too little controlled".
Author: Eric Hayot Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Asian Studies Pennsylvania State University Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199700117 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
Why has the West for so long and in so many different ways expressed the idea that the Chinese have a special relationship to cruelty and to physical pain? What can the history of that idea and its expressions teach us about the politics of the West's contemporary relation to China? And what does it tell us about the philosophy of modernity? The Hypothetical Mandarin is, in some sense, a history of the Western imagination. It is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, of globalization, of human rights, and of the idea of the modern. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the former would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. Hayots wide-ranging discussion draws on accounts of torture, on medical case studies, travelers tales, photographs, plasticized corpses, polemical broadsides, watercolors, and on oil paintings. His analyses show that the historical connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "China," and why the story of the West's Chinese pain goes to the heart of the relation between language and the body and the social experience of the modern human being. Written in an ebullient prose, The Hypothetical Mandarin demonstrates how the network that intertwines China, sympathy, and modernity continues to shape the economic and human experience.
Author: Nicholas Ostler Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0066210860 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 644
Book Description
The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. Yet the history of the world's great languages has been very little told. Empires of the Word, by the wide-ranging linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations in education, culture, and diplomacy devised by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English. Besides these epic ahievements, language failures are equally fascinating: Why did German get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, though the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India? As this book splendidly and authoritatively reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real character of peoples; and, for all the recent tehnical mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term preeminence. The language future, like the language past, will be full of surprises.
Author: Gaston Dorren Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic ISBN: 0802190944 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into today’s remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).
Author: Gaston Dorren Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press ISBN: 0802146724 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
“Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it’s just so much fun to read.” —NPR English is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn’t speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s people in their mother tongues, you’d need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Whisking readers along on a delightful journey, he traces how these languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and shows how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics, elegant but complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to outsiders. Babel reveals why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren also shares his experiences studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten myths about Chinese characters, and discovers the region where Swahili became the lingua franca. Witty and utterly fascinating, Babel will change how you look at and listen to the world. “Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Author: Jing Tsu Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0735214743 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
Author: Anne Splingaerd Megowan Publisher: Xlibris ISBN: 9781425792374 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The life of the poor Brussels orphan who became an honored mandarin in China may sound more like fiction than a true biography, but Paul Splingaerd really did walk this earth. The four decades that he spent in China were during the pivotal post-Opium Wars years when China's doors were being pried open for trade with the West. Paul explored all regions of the "Middle Kingdom" with renowned German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen, and established a fur trading business in Mongolia before being appointed customs inspector in China's far west by powerful viceroy Li Hongzhang. Find out what brought Splingaerd to China, and learn how he earned recognition from his king, King Leopold II, who made him a "Chevalier de L'Ordre de la Couronne." Read about Paul's role in the construction of the first iron bridge across the venerable Yellow River at Lanzhou. Splingaerd's perspective on China's interaction with the West during the late nineteenth century, offers the reader many intriguing insights into the roots of China's dynamism in the twenty-first century. Masterfully authored by Splingaerd's great-granddaughter, Anne Splingaerd Megowan, The Belgian Mandarin is one unforgettable read, a well-researched and richly illustrated account of the life of this truly exceptional individual.
Author: Linda Sue Park Publisher: Clarion Books ISBN: 132878150X Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
In this compelling, emotionally engaging novel set in 1880, a half-Chinese girl and her white father try to make a home in Dakota Territory, in the face of racism and resistance.
Author: Stephan Gramley Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1040013392 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 423
Book Description
The History of English: An Introduction provides a chronological analysis of the linguistic, social, and cultural development of the English language from before its establishment in Britain around the year 450 to the present. Each chapter represents a new stage in the evolution of the language, all illustrated with a rich and diverse selection of primary texts. The book also explores the wider global course of the language, including a historical review of English in its pidgin and creole varieties and as a native and/or second language in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Australasia. The third edition, carefully revised and updated throughout, includes: ● chapter introductions and conclusions to assist in orientation plus additional marginal references throughout; ● the addition of 21 timelines often running from Old English to Present-Day English and focusing on a variety of features; ● a new focus on the relevance of change for and in Present-Day English; ● discussions on the role and image of women, the (in-)visibility of social classes, and regional variation in English; ● material on bilingualism, code-switching, and borrowing, and on the effects of the social media on language use; ● over 90 textual examples demonstrating linguistic change and over 100 figures, tables, and maps, including 31 colour images, to support and illuminate the text; ● updated online support material including brief introductions to Old and to Middle English, further articles on linguistic, historical, and cultural phenomena which go beyond the scope of the book, additional sample texts, exercises, and audio clips. With study questions as well as recommendations for further reading and topics for further study, The History of English is essential reading for any student of the English language and will be of relevance to any course addressing the origins and development of the English language.
Author: Derk Jan Eppink
Author: Derk Jan Eppink
Author: Eric Hayot Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Asian Studies Pennsylvania State University
Author: Nicholas Ostler
Author: Austin Coates
Author: Gaston Dorren
Author: Gaston Dorren
Author: Jing Tsu
Author: Anne Splingaerd Megowan
Author: Linda Sue Park
Author: Stephan Gramley