Author: Nicholas Ostler
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062047353
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 541
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Book Description
A “monumental” account of the rise and fall of languages, with “many fresh insights, useful historical anecdotes, and charming linguistic oddities” (Chicago Tribune). Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world’s great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that bind communities together and make possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once “universal” languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet’s diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises. “Readers learn how languages ancient and modern spread and how they dwindle. . . . Few books bring more intellectual excitement to the study of language.” —Booklist (starred review) “Sparkles with arcane knowledge, shrewd perceptions, and fresh ideas…The sheer sweep of his analysis is breathtaking.” —Times Literary Supplement “Ambitious and accessible . . . Ostler stresses the role of culture, commerce and conquest in the rise and fall of languages, whether Spanish, Portuguese and French in the Americas or Dutch in Asia and Africa.” —Publishers Weekly “A marvelous book.” —National Review
Author: John Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521815010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
This book seeks to discover what the Romans themselves thought about their empire by examining the changing meaning of key terms.
Author: Clifford Ando
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204883
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates in Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield. Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools—most prominently analogy and fiction—used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought. In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.
Author: Suhanthie Motha
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 0807755125
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
This timely book takes a critical look at the teaching of English, showing how language is used to create hierarchies of cultural privilege in public schools across the country. Motha closely examines the work of four ESL teachers who developed anti-racist pedagogical practices during their first year of teaching. Their experiences, and those of their students, provide a compelling account of how new teachers might gain agency for culturally responsive teaching in spite of school cultures that often discourage such approaches. The author combines current research with her original analyses to shed light on real classroom situations faced by teachers of linguistically diverse populations. This book will help pre- and in-service teachers to think about such challenges as differential achievement between language learners and "native-speakers;" about hierarchies of languages and language varieties; about the difference between an accent identity and an incorrect pronunciation; and about the use of students' first languages in English classes. This resource offers implications for classroom teaching, educational policy, school leadership, and teacher preparation, including reflection questions at the end of each chapter.
Author: Robert H. MacDonald
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719037498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
The debate about the Empire dealt in idealism and morality, and both sides employed the language of feeling, and frequently argued their case in dramatic terms. This book opposes two sides of the Empire, first, as it was presented to the public in Britain, and second, as it was experienced or imagined by its subjects abroad. British imperialism was nurtured by such upper middle-class institutions as the public schools, the wardrooms and officers' messes, and the conservative press. The attitudes of 1916 can best be recovered through a reconstruction of a poetics of popular imperialism. The case-study of Rhodesia demonstrates the almost instant application of myth and sign to a contemporary imperial crisis. Rudyard Kipling was acknowledged throughout the English-speaking world not only as a wonderful teller of stories but as the 'singer of Greater Britain', or, as 'the Laureate of Empire'. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Empire gained a beachhead in the classroom, particularly in the coupling of geography and history. The Island Story underlined that stories of heroic soldiers and 'fights for the flag' were easier for teachers to present to children than lessons in morality, or abstractions about liberty and responsible government. The Education Act of 1870 had created a need for standard readers in schools; readers designed to teach boys and girls to be useful citizens. The Indian Mutiny was the supreme test of the imperial conscience, a measure of the morality of the 'master-nation'.
Author: James Griffiths
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786999668
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A Globe & Mail Book of the Year "A stimulating work on the politics of language." LA Review of Books As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'. In Speak Not, James Griffiths reports from the frontlines of the battle to preserve minority languages, from his native Wales, Hawaii and indigenous American nations, to southern China and Hong Kong. He explores the revival of the Welsh language as a blueprint for how to ensure new generations are not robbed of their linguistic heritage, outlines how loss of indigenous languages is the direct result of colonialism and globalisation and examines how technology is both hindering and aiding the fight to prevent linguistic extinction. Introducing readers to compelling characters and examining how indigenous communities are fighting for their languages, Griffiths ultimately explores how languages hang on, what happens when they don't, and how indigenous tongues can be preserved and brought back from the brink.
Author: Laurent Dubreuil
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467500
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
The relationship between power and language has been a central theme in critical theory for decades now, yet there is still much to be learned about the sheer force of language in the world in which we live. In Empire of Language, Laurent Dubreuil explores the power-language phenomenon in the context of European and, particularly, French colonialism and its aftermath. Through readings of the colonial experience, he isolates a phraseology based on possession, in terms of both appropriation and haunting, that has persisted throughout the centuries. Not only is this phraseology a legacy of the past, it is still active today, especially in literary renderings of the colonial experience—but also, and more paradoxically, in anticolonial discourse. This phrase shaped the teaching of European languages in the (former) empires, and it tried to configure the usage of those idioms by the "Indigenes." Then, scholarly disciplines have to completely reconsider their discursive strategies about the colonial, if, at least, they attempt to speak up.Dubreuil ranges widely in terms of time and space, from the ancien régime through the twentieth century, from Paris to Haiti to Quebec, from the Renaissance to the riots in the banlieues. He examines diverse texts, from political speeches, legal documents, and colonial treatises to anthropological essays, poems of the Négritude, and contemporary rap, ever attuned to the linguistic strategies that undergird colonial power. Equally conversant in both postcolonial criticism and poststructuralist scholarship on language, but also deeply grounded in the sociohistorical context of the colonies, Dubreuil sets forth the conditions for an authentically postcolonial scholarship, one that acknowledges the difficulty of getting beyond a colonialism—and still maintains the need for an afterward.
Author: David West Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108591876
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Combining statistical modelling and archival study, English and Empire investigates how African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian characters have been voiced in British fiction and drama produced between 1768 and 1929. The analysis connects patterns of linguistic representation to changes in the imperial political economy, to evolving language ideologies that circulate in the Anglophone world, and to shifts in sociocultural anxieties that crosscut race and empire. In carrying out his investigation, David West Brown makes the case for a methodological approach that links the distant (quantitative) and close (qualitative) reading of diverse digital artefacts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book will appeal to a variety of scholars and students including sociolinguists interested in historical language variation, as well as literary scholars interested in postcolonial studies and the digital humanities.
Author: Peter S. Onuf
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922041
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Thomas Jefferson believed that the American revolution was atransformative moment in the history of political civilization. He hoped that hisown efforts as a founding statesman and theorist would help construct a progressiveand enlightened order for the new American nation that would be a model andinspiration for the world. Peter S. Onuf's new book traces Jefferson's vision of theAmerican future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire.Onuf's unsettling recognition that Jefferson's famed egalitarianism was elaboratedin an imperial context yields strikingly original interpretations of our nationalidentity and our ideas of race, of westward expansion and the Civil War, and ofAmerican global dominance in the twentiethcentury. Jefferson's vision of an American "empirefor liberty" was modeled on a British prototype. But as a consensual union ofself-governing republics without a metropolis, Jefferson's American empire would befree of exploitation by a corrupt imperial ruling class. It would avoid the cycle ofwar and destruction that had characterized the European balance ofpower. The Civil War cast in high relief thetragic limitations of Jefferson's political vision. After the Union victory, as thereconstructed nation-state developed into a world power, dreams of the United Statesas an ever-expanding empire of peacefully coexisting states quickly faded frommemory. Yet even as the antebellum federal union disintegrated, a Jeffersoniannationalism, proudly conscious of America's historic revolution against imperialdomination, grew up in its place. In Onuf's view, Jefferson's quest to define a new American identity also shaped his ambivalentconceptions of slavery and Native American rights. His revolutionary fervor led himto see Indians as "merciless savages" who ravaged the frontiers at the Britishking's direction, but when those frontiers were pacified, a more benevolentJefferson encouraged these same Indians to embrace republican values. AfricanAmerican slaves, by contrast, constituted an unassimilable captive nation, unjustlywrenched from its African homeland. His great panacea: colonization. Jefferson's ideas about race revealthe limitations of his conception of American nationhood. Yet, as Onuf strikinglydocuments, Jefferson's vision of a republican empire--a regime of peace, prosperity, and union without coercion--continues to define and expand the boundaries ofAmerican national identity.
Author: Christina Yi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545363
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan embarked on a policy of territorial expansion that would claim Taiwan and Korea, among others. Assimilation policies led to a significant body of literature written in Japanese by colonial writers by the 1930s. After its unconditional surrender in 1945, Japan abruptly receded to a nation-state, establishing its present-day borders. Following Korea’s liberation, Korean was labeled the national language of the Korean people, and Japanese-language texts were purged from the Korean literary canon. At the same time, these texts were also excluded from the Japanese literary canon, which was reconfigured along national, rather than imperial, borders. In Colonizing Language, Christina Yi investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, analyzing how key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. She considers a range of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects published in the 1930s and early 1940s and then traces how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on writers from the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Drawing upon fiction, essays, film, literary criticism, and more, Yi challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories and the postcolonial present in East Asia. A Center for Korean Research Book
